Government & Communications

Most reporters share a sense that covering President Donald Trump is a challenge like no other, at a time when political journalists and the First Amendment are under siege. With the easy accessibility of social media, some political reporters find themselves getting death threats. 

President Donald Trump is using his planned absence from the White House Correspondents Association dinner Saturday, April 28, to try and raise money for his next election. The President didn't show up for 2017's dinner, either, where the press and the President customarily get together to trade barbs and toasts, a temporary glove-dropping that had become a regular stop for President's of both parties before the current one.

More than four months after the Federal Communications Commission voted to repeal network neutrality rules, the rules are technically still on the books, and we still don't know when they will die their final death. Why are the rules still in place? There's a technical answer related to how Pai structured the repeal, and there is speculation on why Pai structured it that way.

In April, Washington lawmakers overwhelmingly passed a narrow bill that seeks to crack down on sex trafficking online. To most, it seemed like a no-brainer: Sex trafficking is obviously bad. The law, however, changed Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act of 1996, a 20-year-old communications law that is the basis of the free internet as we know it.

The Federal Communications Commission’s top lawyer says that Republican commissioners who attended the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) earlier in 2018 did not violate any ethics rules. FCC General Counsel Thomas Johnson Jr. said that the appearance by the three GOP commissioners was in line with ethics requirements because even though CPAC is a conservative event, it’s nonpartisan.

There is a lot of confusion on the effective date for the 2017 Net Neutrality Repeal Order, aka “Restoring Internet Freedom — Which Is Not In The Least Overdramatic Unlike You Hysterical Hippies.” This is not surprising, given the rather confusing way the Federal Register Notice reads.

The widespread concerns over misinformation online have created a tension in the United States between taking steps to restrict that information – including possible government regulation – and protecting the long-held belief in the freedom to access and publish information. A new Pew Research Center survey finds that the majority of Americans are resistant to action by the US government that might also limit those freedoms but are more open to action from technology companies.

[Commentary] On April 11, 11 Democratic senators and Independent Sen. Bernie Sanderssent a letter to Federal Communications Commission Chairman Ajit Pai requesting that the proposed merger between Sinclair Broadcast Group and Tribune Media be denied. Their request didn’t stop there; the senators requested not only that Sinclair’s future acquisitions be denied but that its existing broadcast licenses be reviewed and a decision be made on whether they should be revoked. The senators wrote this letter seemingly without a sense of the tremendous ironies laced throughout.

More than 30 high-tech companies, led by Microsoft and Facebook, announced a set of principles that included a declaration that they would not help any government — including that of the United States — mount cyberattacks against “innocent civilians and enterprises from anywhere, reflecting Silicon Valley’s effort to separate itself from government cyberwarfare.

The Supreme Court announced that it would not decide whether federal prosecutors can force Microsoft to turn over digital data stored outside the United States. The move followed arguments in the case in February and the enactment of a new federal law that both sides said made the case moot.