Elections and Media

Matthew Petersen, the vice chairman of the Federal Election Commission (FEC), submitted his resignation letter to President Donald Trump, leaving the agency without the necessary number of commissioners to vote on proposed actions. Petersen, a Republican who has served as a commissioner since 2008, wrote that he will formally step down on Aug 31.  Petersen was heavily involved in technology issues, which he highlighted in his resignation letter.

A loose network of conservative operatives allied with the White House is pursuing what they say will be an aggressive operation to discredit news organizations deemed hostile to President Donald Trump by publicizing damaging information about journalists. It is the latest step in a long-running effort by President Trump and his allies to undercut the influence of legitimate news reporting.

In his bid to be the Democratic nominee for president, Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) proposed the Green New Deal. Broadband-related provisions of the proposal include:

President Donald Trump tweeted, "Wow, Report Just Out! Google manipulated from 2.6 million to 16 million votes for Hillary Clinton in 2016 Election! This was put out by a Clinton supporter, not a Trump Supporter! Google should be sued. My victory was even bigger than thought! @JudicialWatch." President Trump’s tweet appears to refer to documents leaked to conservative group Project Veritas, but the documents do not appear to contain any outright allegation of vote manipulation or attempts to bias the election.

Democrats are offering President Donald Trump's rural supporters a reason to turn against him in 2020 — his failure to bring them the high-speed internet he promised.

It’s likely that a robust antitrust enforcement regime, in tandem with a suite of economic policies could create a market more amenable to sustaining journalism. But in the absence of that, and the uncertainty as to whether the market is fundamentally able to provide the necessary journalistic coverage to inform and serve a functioning democracy and civic life, it’s worth considering what no Democrat has dared advocate for 50-some years: a renewed and robust public investment in media. Yet the fate of (public) media has gotten surprisingly little attention in the 2020 cycle.

The incentives for foreign countries to meddle are much greater than in 2016, and the tactics could look dramatically different.

President Donald Trump accused Google of favoring negative news stories about him in the 2016 presidential election, apparently in response to a report on Fox News. In a series of three tweets on Aug 6, President Trump said he had met in the Oval Office with Google chief executive Sundar Pichai, who told him the company didn’t boost Hillary Clinton during the 2016 presidential election, wouldn’t interfere with the 2020 election, and wasn’t involved with the Chinese military. “We are watching Google very closely!” Trump said in a tweet on Aug 6.

Despite broad efforts to crack down on misinformation ahead of the 2020 election, the primary season so far has been chock full of deceptive messages and misleading information.  More sophisticated tactics that have emerged since 2016 threaten to derail the democratic process by further polluting online debate. And the seemingly unending influx of fakery could plant enough suspicion and cynicism to throw an otherwise legitimate election into question. "Far more people have gotten the idea that you can throw a U.S.