Ownership

Even while under fire for requiring its outlets to run conservative content, Sinclair Broadcast Group is increasing the "must-run" segments across its affiliates featuring former Trump White House official Boris Epshteyn to nine times a week. The move comes as the company is seeking to dramatically expand its holdings by purchasing Tribune Media for $3.9 billion, which would make it the largest local television operator in the country, with more than 200 stations.

But Sinclair's unusual practice of requiring all its stations to run reports dictated from the corporate offices has been flagged by critics of the Tribune acquisition and even become a subject of late-night TV ribbing by HBO's John Oliver. Epshteyn was hired by Sinclair as chief political analyst in April after a short ride in the White House overseeing the choice of Trump surrogates for TV appearances. Now, on Sinclair, he is offering his own political commentary. His "Bottom Line with Boris" segments already air three times a week, but will now triple in frequency, featuring a mix of his political commentary as well as "talk backs" with local stations and interviews with members of Congress. The segments will have a “billboard,” meaning they’re sponsored, but will not be sponsored content, a Sinclair spokesperson said. Epshteyn’s segments are “must runs,” so all the Sinclair stations across the country will air them along with their other “must-run” segments including conservative commentary from Mark Hyman and the Terrorism Alert Desk segments. Epshteyn reliably parrots the White House's point of view on most issues.

Republicans and Democrats offer starkly different assessments of the impact of several of the nation’s leading institutions – including the news media, colleges and universities and churches and religious organizations – and in some cases, the gap in these views is significantly wider today than it was just a year ago.

The national survey by Pew Research Center, conducted June 8-18 among 2,504 adults, finds that partisan differences in views of the national news media, already wide, have grown even wider. Democrats’ views of the effect of the national news media have grown more positive over the past year, while Republicans remain overwhelmingly negative. About as many Democrats and Democratic-leaning independents think the news media has a positive (44%) as negative (46%) impact on the way things are going in the country. The share of Democrats holding a positive view of the news media’s impact has increased 11 percentage points since last August (33%). Republicans, by about eight-to-one (85% to 10%), say the news media has a negative effect. These views have changed little in the past few years. While a majority of the public (55%) continues to say that colleges and universities have a positive effect on the way things are going in the country these days, Republicans express increasingly negative views. A majority of Republicans and Republican-leaning independents (58%) now say that colleges and universities have a negative effect on the country, up from 45% last year. By contrast, most Democrats and Democratic leaners (72%) say colleges and universities have a positive effect, which is little changed from recent years.

A group of news organizations will begin an effort to win the right to negotiate collectively with the big online platforms – Facebook and Google -- and will ask for a limited antitrust exemption from Congress in order to do so.

It’s an extreme measure with long odds. But the industry considers it worth a shot, given its view that Google and Facebook, regardless of their intentions, are posing a bigger threat economically than President Trump is (so far) with his rhetoric. That’s how David Chavern, the chief executive of the News Media Alliance, put it. The Alliance, the main newspaper industry trade group, is leading the effort to bargain as a group. But it has buy-in across the spectrum of its membership, bringing together competitors like The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal and The Washington Post, as well as scores of regional papers like The Star Tribune of Minneapolis, which face the gravest threats.

The small army of career antitrust officials is marching toward a great unknown. For one thing, the Justice Department officials still don’t have a boss who will have the final say on whether to approve or block AT&T’s purchase of Time Warner.

President Trump’s pick for assistant attorney general in charge of antitrust matters, Makan Delrahim, has been held up in a logjam of nominees in the Senate. And President Donald Trump himself, who said during the 2016 campaign that he opposed the deal, is another wild card. A senior administration official said that members of the White House were discussing how they might use their perch over the merger review as leverage over Time Warner’s news network, CNN. All of that has effectively put into limbo the most significant business deal before the Trump administration, a benchmark for business transactions going forward. In turn, that has cast a cloud over the business world, which is watching the lengthy regulatory process with intense interest.

Sen Amy Klobuchar (D-MN) has warned attorney general Jeff Sessions that any political interference in the Justice Department's review of the AT&T-Time Warner merger would be "unacceptable." Sen Klobuchar was responding to a report in the New York Times that White House advisors have discussed leveraging the deal against Time Warner-owned CNN, which President Donald Trump has hammered as fake news—most recently in a tweet featuring him pummeling a figure with a CNN logo for a head.

President Trump said as a candidate his White House would oppose the deal. In a letter to AG Sessions, sen Klobuchar said that while she has "serious questions" about the deal's impact, "the transaction should be judged solely on its impact on competition, innovation, and consumers, not as 'leverage' for political gain." She added: “Any political interference in antitrust enforcement is unacceptable. Even more concerning, in this instance, is that it appears that some advisers to the President may believe that it is appropriate for the government to use its law enforcement authority to alter or censor the press. Such an action would violate the First Amendment.”

The Federal Communications Commission is opening up the docket on the Sinclair Broadcasting Group’s proposed acquisition of Tribune Media for the public to weigh in. The FCC is currently reviewing the $3.9 billion deal between the two media companies to determine if it is in the “public interest.” Parties interested in making their case regarding the merger heard can, as of July 6, make “ex parte” presentations to the FCC, which will be publicly disclosed on the agency’s website. The presentations can come in the form of oral or written arguments.

Critics of the deal have argued it might harm the public by significantly consolidating the local news media market, where both Sinclair and Tribune have large holdings. In its public notice, the FCC said the merger would slightly exceed the 39 percent national audience reach limit. The companies, however, have told the FCC that they “will take such actions to the extent required to comply with the terms of the Merger Agreement and the national television ownership limit (including the UHF Discount), in order to obtain FCC approval of the Transaction.”

In a big victory for cable operators large and small, a federal court has said the Federal Communications Commission was within its authority to make it easier for cable video services to shed basic rate regulations. The US Court of Appeals has upheld the FCC's decision—under former chairman Tom Wheeler—reversing the rebuttable presumption that cable operators are not subject to local competition, thereby making regulators prove there is a lack of competition or rate regulations go away.

The onus had been on cable operators to prove their was competition, but the FCC concluded that the near-nationwide availability of DBS essentially represented that competition. The commission, with the strong backing of cable operators—NCTA–The Internet & Television Association and American Cable Association both intervened in the court challenge on the FCC's side—in 2016 voted to reverse the rebuttable presumption and assume cable systems faced local market competition (primarily given the ubiquity of satellite TV) unless telecom regulators or other challengers could prove they did not. A finding of effective competition lifts basic cable price regulations. Writing for the three-judge panel that rejected the challenge to that decision by the National Association of Broadcasters, the National Association of Telecommunications Officers and Advisors, and the Northern Dakota County Cable Communications Commission, judge Douglas Ginsburg said the FCC decision was within its authority.

Thanks in part to organizations like Free Press Action Fund, the movement to protect free expression online is strong — for proof look at the millions of people fighting to save Network Neutrality. But there’s an important problem that many free-expression advocates aren’t aware of because it usually lurks just beneath the sleek interfaces of our devices and software: DRM, or digital restrictions management.

DRM is a broad class of technologies that give the manufacturer of a digital good special control over the ways people use it. DRM has been around since the 1990s and has colonized personal computers, smartphones, game consoles, cars, tractors and more. DRM harms free expression most when it interferes with our use of media like videos, books and music. This DRM is the underlying technology that prevents you from copying Amazon Kindle e-books on to a Barnes and Noble Nook, from downloading a clip of a movie on Netflix for use in a documentary or from sampling a song from Spotify in a new piece of music. DRM exists primarily so that Hollywood studios, big music labels and streaming services like Netflix and Spotify can use it to artificially corral us into spending more money than we would if we were able to make full use of media.

[Zak Rogoff is the campaigns manager at the Free Software Foundation.]

President Donald Trump bashed the American press corps on July 6, singling out CNN and others as "fake news." That wasn't new, of course. What was different was where it occurred. This latest example of Trump's anti-media rhetoric -- perhaps the defining element of his presidency thus far -- came during a visit to Warsaw, Poland, his second overseas trip since taking office. In the past, presidents have often used foreign visits to preach the value of a free press. President Trump went a different way.

[Commentary] After an extensive investigation, the European Union found that Google has, for many years, violated European antitrust law by rigging its general search results to favor its own comparison shopping service over rivals. But a recent Post editorial faults the EU for imposing a $2.7 billion fine on the company. The editorial board questioned whether Google’s conduct hurt either competitors (who were just “unlucky,” according to The Post) or consumers. It claimed that users “may well prefer to see” Google’s results first and that the fine “seems to be a case of punishment without crime.” This view ignores the facts.

Google painstakingly executed a strategy to increase its search-ad revenue by making it both possible and necessary for merchants to raise prices to consumers, as a review of studies from the EU, the U.S. Federal Trade Commission and others show. And as a result, Google’s ad revenue has soared at the expense of its users.

[Gary Reback is a Silicon Valley antitrust lawyer at Carr & Ferrell LLP]