Government & Communications

[Commentary] The most distressing aspect of the recent period of aggression toward freedom of speech and press in this country is the willing rejection of Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.’s starting premise: that overcoming the natural and, in his terms, “logical” impulse to persecute others who disagree with or are different from us is the hallmark of a civilized society. When you relish intolerance, you are reversing course on one of the most profound tenets of modern thought. So that when a president stokes the fears and prejudices that exist beneath the surface, he models a different—and divisive—kind of behavior for citizens.

In this way, just as our unparalleled protections of speech and the press have over decades laid the foundation for a broader ethos of tolerance, so can the lack of respect for these same rights quickly send us careening backward toward a pathos of intolerance that reaches far beyond speech, infecting all of our decision-making.

[Lee C. Bollinger became Columbia University’s 19th president in 2002.]

In the spring of 2012, Donald Trump’s two eldest children, Ivanka Trump and Donald Trump Jr., found themselves in a precarious legal position. For two years, prosecutors in the Manhattan District Attorney’s office had been building a criminal case against them for misleading prospective buyers of units in the Trump SoHo, a hotel and condo development that was failing to sell. Despite the best efforts of the siblings’ defense team, the case had not gone away. An indictment seemed like a real possibility. The evidence included e-mails from the Trumps making clear that they were aware they were using inflated figures about how well the condos were selling to lure buyers. New York prosecutors were preparing a case. Then the DA overruled his staff after a visit from a top donor: Trump attorney Marc Kasowitz.

President Donald Trump lambasted the "the fake news media" in a tweet early Oct 4, saying it is "out of control." "Wow, so many Fake News stories today. No matter what I do or say, they will not write or speak truth. The Fake News Media is out of control!" the president said.

“Sixteen versus literally thousands of people,” President Trump said, noting the difference in the official death tolls. “You can be very proud.” “Every death is a horror,” he said “But if you look at a real catastrophe like Katrina, and you look at the tremendous hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of people that died, and you look at what happened here with, really, a storm that was just totally overpowering — nobody has ever seen anything like this.” The president in an earlier tweet on Oct 4 slammed some of the coverage and said he had a "great day" on the island.

Americans are increasingly confident in the news media and less so in President Donald Trump’s administration after a tumultuous year in US politics that tested the public’s trust in both institutions, according to a Reuters/Ipsos opinion poll released Oct 3. The poll of more than 14,300 people found that the percentage of adults who said they had a “great deal” or “some” confidence in the press rose to 48 percent in September from 39 percent last November. Earlier in 2017, President Trump branded the entire industry as the “enemy of the American people.”

The percentage of those who said they had “hardly any” confidence in the press dropped to 45 percent from 51 percent over the same period. Confidence in Trump’s administration moved in the opposite direction. Reuters/Ipsos, which tracked confidence in major institutions every couple of months after the 2016 presidential election, found in late January that 52 percent of Americans had a “great deal” or “some” confidence in the new president’s executive branch. That dropped to 51 percent in the May survey and to 48 percent in the latest poll. Trump took office in January. In comparison, 57 percent of Americans expressed similar levels of confidence in former Democratic President Barack Obama’s outgoing administration in November.

President Donald Trump's son-in-law Jared Kushner and daughter Ivanka Trump moved their personal e-mail accounts to computers run by the Trump Organization as public scrutiny intensified over their use of private e-mails to conduct White House business, internet registration records show.

The move, made just days after Kushner’s use of a personal e-mail account first became public, came shortly after special counsel Robert Mueller asked the White House to turn over records related to his investigation of Russia's interference in the 2016 election and possible collusion with Trump associates. It also more closely intertwines President Trump’s administration with his constellation of private businesses. Kushner, who is a senior adviser to the president, first faced scrutiny for his private e-mail use on Sept. 24, when his lawyer confirmed that he had occasionally used a personal e-mail account to communicate with other White House officials. Kushner's contacts with Russians during the presidential campaign have drawn the attention of federal investigators. According to internet registration records, Kushner and his wife Ivanka Trump, who is also a senior adviser, switched the location of their e-mail accounts to a server operated by the Trump Organization on either Sept. 26 or 27, as attention from the media and lawmakers intensified.

[Commentary] Italy’s antitrust chief Giovanni Pitruzzella feels so overwhelmed by the amount of information on the internet that he has called for government regulation to fight fake news. Pitruzzella builds his case by contrasting the First Amendment with the European Convention on Human Rights, which he argues provides no constitutional protection of “fake news.” This is due to an interpretation of the limits of protected speech that says that the distribution of “fake news,” in Pitruzzella’s words, violates Europeans’ “right to be pluralistically informed.” Yes, our digital era and the explosion of speech and communication on social media are unique.

But the introduction of the printing press in the 15th century and its impact on the world in the ensuing centuries may serve as an instructive analogy from which Pitruzzella may take a lesson or two. In the 16th and 17th century, access to the press triggered waves of fake news and dissemination of wild conspiracy theories about witches and millenarian crazes. Religious fanaticism was printed side-by-side with scientific discoveries. During the first century after Gutenberg, print did as much to spread lies and false information as enlightened truth.

[Flemming Rose is a WorldPost contributor and a senior fellow at the Cato Institute. Jacob Mchangama is director of the Copenhagen-based think tank Justitia.]

US Ambassador to the United Nations Nikki Haley's use of her Twitter account violated a federal law that bars federal employees from using their offices for political purposes, the U.S. Office of Special Counsel said Oct 3. In a letter to the watchdog group Citizens for Ethics and Responsibility in Washington (CREW), the deputy chief of OSC's Hatch Act Unit said that Haley was in clear violation of the Hatch Act when she retweeted the president's endorsement of Ralph Norman, who was running for a South Carolina House seat at the time. Norman went on to win the election. The retweet suggested that she was acting in her official capacity when she appeared to second the president's endorsement, according to the OSC.

Companies like Facebook, Google, and Amazon dominate their markets, and have deep pockets and armies of lobbyists. That, combined with historical precedent, gridlock in Congress, and the Donald Trump White House’s aversion to regulation in general, means passing new laws or rules to rein them is going to be a tough battle, some government and industry veterans say.

As the internet and tech industry in the US has grown in the past two decades, not only has federal rule-making not kept pace, but the government hasn’t adapted to oversee it. In recent years, tech companies from Airbnb to Uber to Google have poured money into lobbying in Washington DC and now have sizable in-house and outside teams that regularly meet with Congress, fund think tanks, and try to influence how lawmakers, federal employees, and the general public see the industry. The industry’s total lobbying spending jumped from $1.2 million in 1998 to $59.2 million in 2016, and it’s on pace to meet or beat that amount in 2017.

White House officials have begun examining e-mails associated with a third and previously unreported e-mail account on Jared Kushner and Ivanka Trump’s private domain, apparently. Hundreds of e-mails have been sent since January from White House addresses to accounts on the Kushner family domain. Many of those e-mails went not to Kushner’s or Ivanka Trump’s personal addresses but to an account they both had access to and shared with their personal household staff for family scheduling. The e-mails — which include nonpublic travel documents, internal schedules and some official White House materials —were in many cases sent from Ivanka Trump, her assistant Bridges Lamar and others who work with the couple in the White House.

The e-mails to the third account were largely sent from White House accounts but occasionally came from other private accounts, apparently. The existence of additional accounts on the family domain beyond the two personal accounts used by Kushner and Ivanka Trump and reported earlier raises new questions about the extent of personal e-mail use by the couple during their time as White House aides. Their use of private e-mail accounts for White House business also raises concerns about the security of potentially sensitive government documents, which have been forwarded to private accounts.

The Trump administration is weighing one of the most significant rulings on how the internet will operate in the future — broadly affecting both the US economy and how Americans get crucial information — but the decision is already a foregone conclusion.

Unlike three years ago, when Washington was abuzz over the Federal Communications Commission enshrining network neutrality into hard-set rules, this time around it’s crickets. And that has net-neutrality supporters worried. When former-FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler last proposed rules, internet providers were livid. Armies of lawyers and lobbyists representing AT&T, Verizon, Comcast and others poured into FCC’s headquarters. They came armed with binders, briefs and PowerPoint presentations to confront and cajole FCC commissioners and staff. In all, FCC commissioners and staff held 79 meetings between the release of Wheeler’s proposal in May 2014 and the comment deadline in September 2014, more than a meeting every two days.

Now, three years later, current FCC Chairman Pai, a free-market Republican and staunch critic of government regulations, has proposed to reverse Wheeler’s rules, aggressively pushing a return to classifying internet providers as an “information service,” a designation with far fewer regulations. The change, which the FCC is likely to vote on later this year, would both neuter the commission’s ability to rein in providers and open the possibility, again, of creating slow and fast lanes for internet traffic — determined in part by who is willing to pay. This time around, Republicans control the commission. And it’s a lot quieter at the FCC — perhaps because the internet titans see a friend in the chair who isn’t prone to considering other opinions.

From May 18, when the FCC released Pai’s proposed rules, to the end of the public comment period on Aug. 30, commissioners and agency staff met only 16 times with companies and other organizations — about one meeting every six days, or one-fifth as many as when Wheeler issued his proposal in 2014. No one from AT&T set up a meeting. No Verizon. No Comcast. In fact, of the 16 meetings, the FCC met with only two, relatively small, internet providers: Antietam Cable Television Inc., a provider serving a rural county in Maryland, and Home Telephone Company Inc., which provides service north of Charleston, South Carolina.

Most of the people sitting down with the FCC worked for advocacy groups such as the National Hispanic Media Coalition, which lobbies for inclusive and affordable communications, and the Voices for Internet Freedom Coalition, a group of minority organizations that support net neutrality.