Ownership

CNN and its president, Jeff Zucker, are in the middle of their most intense bout yet: an unlikely public fight with the leader of the free world. It is rare that a single news organization attracts the level of ire mustered by President Donald Trump, who over the weekend posted on Twitter a video that portrayed him wrestling a figure with the logo of CNN for a head. But the president’s denunciations — in stinging tweets and slashing speeches, in phrases like “fraud news” and “garbage journalism” — have far outstripped his criticisms of other prominent news outlets, like The New York Times or The Washington Post. And his attacks have spawned a cottage industry of Trump supporters who have declared a digital war of sorts against CNN, including gotcha videos of network employees and threatening messages sent to anchors’ cellphones.

White House advisers have discussed a potential point of leverage over their adversary, a senior administration official said: a pending merger between CNN’s parent company, Time Warner, and AT&T. President Trump’s Justice Department will decide whether to approve the merger, and while analysts say there is little to stop the deal from moving forward, the president’s animus toward CNN remains a wild card.

For years Dish Network Chief Executive Charlie Ergen has sought out deals and partnerships with just about every major telecommunications company, from Sprint to T-Mobile to AT&T —so far, to no avail. Now, the satellite-television mogul is turning his attention to the technology world and a new—and somewhat surprising—potential partner has emerged: Amazon.com CEO Jeff Bezos.

The two men—eccentric billionaires with geek tendencies and shared interest in space and robotics—have gotten to know each other better over the past year and have discussed a partnership to enter the wireless business, apparently. Among the ideas: Amazon could help finance a network Dish is building focused on the “Internet of Things”—the idea that everything from bikes to Amazon’s drones can have web connectivity everywhere. Another idea is that Amazon, as a founding partner of Dish’s new wireless network, could offer an option for Prime members to pay a little more a month for a connectivity or phone plan, one of the people said. No deal is imminent and it is unclear if the companies will move forward with a partnership.

[Commentary] News organizations are still struggling to diversify their ranks. Minority groups only accounted for about 13 percent of newspaper jobs in 2015, according to one industry survey. Tied into that equation is a socioeconomic component that anyone who works in today’s precarious news industry is well aware of: holding a newspaper job often means coming from an affluent household, especially as both undergraduate and graduate degrees, along with a slew of prestigious internships, become the price of admission for scant openings.

Despite all the upheaval over the past year, the unchanging nature of newspaper op-ed pages doesn’t surprise Jack Shafer, a Politico media columnist. “A newspaper is not a Twitter feed. It’s not skywriting,” Shafer says. The editorial status quo will remain as long as the people who control the pages hail from the same classes and ideological backgrounds they’ve always known. “We can argue whether Bret Stephens or Paul Krugman’s ideas are worthy of placement in The New York Times,” Shafer says. “but [A.J.] Liebling said it best. The freedom of the press is guaranteed only to those who own one.”

The old Circa, launched in 2012, was a mobile news app with some interesting ideas — primary among them that the traditional article should be broken up into bite-sized atomic units of news, which could be rearranged, amended, or transformed depending on the story and the reader. It featured an innovative alerts system build around individual story updates, got great App Store reviews, and was appealing to Silicon Valley. When news industry conversations of that time turned to the most interesting innovations, Circa was always on the list; their offices were a regular stop for news executives looking for new ideas.

But in the end, Circa couldn’t attract a broad enough audience and couldn’t raise enough funding; it shut down in 2015. Later that year, the company found a buyer: Sinclair Broadcast Group, the country’s largest owner of local TV stations.

AT&T is denying that its contracts include "forced arbitration" clauses, even though customers must agree to the clauses in order to obtain Internet or TV service. "At the outset, no AT&T customer is ever 'forced' to agree to arbitration," AT&T Executive VP Tim McKone wrote in a letter to US senators. "Customers accept their contracts with AT&T freely and voluntarily; no one 'forces' them to obtain AT&T wireless service, DirecTV programming, or other products and services."

AT&T was responding to concerns raised by Sens Al Franken (D-MN), Richard Blumenthal (D-CT), Ron Wyden (D-OR), Patrick Leahy (D-VT), and Edward Markey (D-MA), who previously alleged that AT&T's use of forced arbitration clauses has helped the company charge higher prices than the ones it advertises to customers. While AT&T is correct that no one is forced to sign up for AT&T service, there are numerous areas of the country where AT&T is the only viable option for wired home Internet service. Even in wireless, where there's more competition, AT&T rivals Verizon and Sprint use mandatory arbitration clauses, so signing up with another carrier won't necessarily let customers avoid arbitration.

[Commentary] The tremor in Silicon Valley emerged from Brussels, not the San Andreas Fault. The European Union’s decision on Google’s search practices makes clear the absence of domestic regulation has opened the door for policies to be decided by foreign governments. It should be a worry – and a wake-up – for all the companies whose platforms drive internet services. The EU has leveled a record-breaking $2.7 billion fine against Google for its search practices. But that’s just money (albeit lots of money).

A more pervasive consequence is the EU mandate that Google alter the manner in which its search results are presented. Domestic internet programs might want to consider their own corporate interest in embracing domestic policy regulatory oversight. The decision of the EU is a wake-up call that perhaps having policies established by the US government isn’t such a bad idea after all.

[Tom Wheeler is a former Chairman to the Federal Communications Commission]

The European Union leveled a $2.7 billion fine against Google for allegedly illegally disadvantaging several European e-commerce sites by algorithmically favoring Google Shopping results over their own. The reasons for the fine are fairly tedious, even by the usual standards of EU bureaucratic action. The specific Google product at issue isn’t well-known or widely used and the specific companies involved aren’t well-known either. And while the cash stakes are nothing to sneer at, the amount of money involved is fairly trivial relative to Google’s overall scale.

Yet for all that, the ruling is arguably the most important development in business regulation on either side of the continent in this decade. The details of the case aren’t important, but the high-level view is. Europe has ruled that Google has monopoly power in the web search market and should be regulated as such. That’s a game-changer. The United States, so far, disagrees.

The latest RTDNA/Hofstra University Annual Survey finds the minority workforce in TV news rose to 24.4%. That’s up more than a full point from a year ago… and is the second highest level ever in TV news.

The minority workforce at non-Hispanic TV stations rose to the highest level ever. The minority workforce in radio is up 2.3… but still well below the level in 2014. Women numbers were mixed in both TV and in radio. Still, as far as minorities are concerned, the bigger picture remains unchanged. In the last 27 years, the minority population in the U.S. has risen 12.1 points; but the minority workforce in TV news is up just over half that at 6.6. And the minority workforce in radio is less than 1 point higher.

As President Donald Trump faces growing backlash for tweeting a video attacking CNN, Twitter told the network that the president's tweet did not violate the social media platform’s terms and conditions. President Trump tweeted an old video clip on July 2 of him beating up an individual at a wrestling event, with a CNN logo superimposed over the man's face. Twitter told CNN it had reviewed the tweet. The video is the latest in a series of attacks on the media by the president made on Twitter. Earlier this week, Trump issued a highly personal and graphic attack on MSNBC host Mika Brzezinski, in which he called her “crazy,” “low I.Q.” and referenced her allegedly bleeding from a facelift.

Cable news outlets are pulling huge ratings and reporters are becoming overnight celebrities as the attacks between President Donald Trump and the media enter strange new territory. The White House has agitated for the fight, believing that every day it spends feuding with the media exposes further press bias and energizes the conservative base. But Trump’s claim that MSNBC host Mika Brzezinski was “bleeding badly from a face-lift" unified the media, with anchors from Fox News to CNN expressing outrage at the president’s tweets and pointing to them as evidence that the press should not treat Trump like a normal president.