Foreign Policy

[Commentary] The message from America’s highest official — that the world’s most professional and trusted media outlets are malicious frauds, that facts and fakeries are equivalent, and that press access to policymaking and diplomacy must submit to the whims of the powerful — represent a set of values that could undermine democracy. As every parent, corporate CEO, and Fox News staffer knows, values are set at the top.

Regardless of how he treats reporters behind closed doors, President Donald Trump has signaled publicly that it’s okay to play nasty with the press. The relationship between the media and the state is an uneasy truce; Trump has offered public officials license to rewrite the terms as they see fit.

[Suzanne Nossel is executive director of the Pen American Center]

It was a bad week for the reports on freedom of the media in Russia.

• Reporters Without Borders released its 2017 world press freedom index. Russia came in at 148, after such bastions of independent media as South Sudan and Thailand.
• A Ukrainian human rights delegation briefed the Helsinki Commission on the case of Oleg Sentsov — a Ukrainian filmmaker imprisoned in a Siberian penal colony for his opposition to the annexation of Crimea — and abuses of Ukrainian journalists and creative professionals more broadly.
• Freedom House unveiled its Freedom of the Press 2017 report. That report gives Russia partial credit for the world’s 13-year low in press freedom.

“Vladimir Putin’s regime in Russia has been a trailblazer in globalizing state propaganda. It continues to leverage pro-Kremlin reporting around the world,” the report states. The three taken in tandem tell a story — one in which violence against journalists in Russia and the region is connected to violence against journalism around the world.

The Office of the Director of National Intelligence April 19 published a document advocating for the protection of what newly minted spy chief Dan Coats has described as the “crown jewels” of the intelligence community. The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Amendments Act, in particular Section 702, authorizes the bulk of the intelligence community’s overseas digital collection powers. A new informational questionnaire published by the ODNI, says maintaining those surveillance powers is “the intelligence community’s top legislative priority for 2017.” If Congress didn’t reauthorize those authorities, it would “greatly impair the ability of the United States to respond to national security threats,” the document notes.

[Commentary] In short, President Donald Trump is very likely a short-timer whose moment on our national stage — even if it lasts four years — will not have warranted the degree to which it has shifted our attention from the important long-term issues that do not go away simply because we stop paying attention to them or, as in the case of climate change or Russian wrongdoing, our president continues to pretend they don’t exist. President Trump will not inadvertently or otherwise damage the fundamentals of what makes America great. Indeed, recent events have restored hope that perhaps his story may one day be seen as proof that the American system works and that bad actors are ultimately brought down.

But we need to tear our eyes away from the spectacle of this clusterf--k of a presidency and its daily dramas and periodically look up and out to our horizons, recognizing that the narcissism aside, there remains real greatness in America that needs tending, planning, and nurturing in the context of the real world — even if, at the moment, there is very little evidence of that greatness at the center of our government.

Americans now find themselves in day four of a real-world experiment: What happens when an elected official with an authoritarian bent and a long-nurtured hatred of media criticism collides with a free press backed by strong democratic institutions?

I have spent years covering the media landscape in China, an illiberal one-party state with notorious and worsening censorship. In White House Press Secretary Sean Spicer’s hostile remarks, I immediately recognized what I have come to know very well — an explicit government demand for media censorship. I was far from alone in my alarm. The New York Times reported that the “news media world found itself in a state of shock” after the day’s remarks. Social media teemed with jokes at Spicer’s expense, juxtaposing his photo with outlandish claims like “the world is flat.” To some degree, clashing with the press is par for the course for governments and leaders around the world. But the authoritarian government in Beijing has shown how to delegitimize those outlets it doesn’t control, by presenting them as biased, unreliable, or unfair.

[Commentary] It’s often the little things that lead up to the big moments. At present, there’s legislation that’s about to head to President Barack Obama for signature that qualifies as one of those moments. Embedded in the 2017 National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) is language aimed at streamlining the bureaucracy of the United States’ government-funded international media outlets. The proposed fix, the result of a hodgepodge compromise between the Hill, the White House, and some Broadcasting Board of Governors (BBG) officials, is to replace the part-time BBG with a full-time CEO who would have full authority to run the show.

The simplicity and likely efficiency of the new arrangement fits the pro-business zeitgeist of the new administration — except for one thing. The key to the success of US broadcasting has always been its professional reporting in alignment with democratic values. So, here’s a message to the president-elect: If it’s a bargain, if the brand is strong, and if it’s not broken, don’t fix it. Our adversaries’ half-truths may sometimes look successful, but that does not mean we want to emulate them. American foreign broadcasting must continue to reflect the American values of free speech, openness to criticism, and tolerance of divergent opinions. That is why our democratic system is better, and in the long run, that is why it will win.

[Jeffrey Gedmin is a senior fellow at Georgetown University and a nonresident senior fellow at the Atlantic Council. He was president of Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty from 2007 to 2011.]

[Commentary] Despite moderate growth in the economy and historically low interest rates, the American labor market still hasn't fully recovered since the big hit of the global financial crisis.

American businesses including Apple, Google, and Oracle sit on piles of cash that in total amount to more than $1 trillion. If Apple thought it profitable to invest this money, surely it would. But it apparently does not see a viable strategy for such growth. Even companies without hoards of money sitting on the sideline are operating well below capacity; much of their physical capital sits unused.

[Altman teaches economics at New York University's Stern School of Business and is chief economist of Big Think]

On August 1, residents of Wenzhou, a city in the eastern Chinese province of Zhejiang, saw their normal Wenzhou Television programming interrupted by caustic messages in stark yellow text appearing on a black background.

One message, emblazoned across the top of the screen, declared, "Damn the Chinese Communist Party's mouthpieces: China Central Television, Peoples' Daily" -- the first a broadcaster, the latter a newspaper, and both generally acknowledged to toe the party line -- as well as "the Propaganda Department and the State Radio and Film Administration," both agencies that exercise government censorship.

Wenzhou Television could not be immediately reached for comment.

More than a year after Edward Snowden revealed a vast network of eavesdropping by the United States, a new poll has found that people around the world are overwhelmingly opposed to American electronic spying and far less likely to believe that the US respects the personal freedoms of its own people.

The poll found huge opposition to the US government monitoring the e-mails and phone calls of people in their own countries. Overall, 81 percent of respondents said it was "unacceptable" for the US to monitor citizens of their countries, and 73 percent said it was unacceptable to spy on their leaders.

A US solar panel manufacturer whose business secrets were allegedly stolen by Chinese computer hackers has asked the US government to investigate the matter, setting in motion a process that could see the United States impose trade penalties for the first time in response to state-sponsored cyber-espionage against an American company.

In a filing with the Commerce Department on July 1, the US subsidiary of German company SolarWorld, which builds solar panels and equipment, asked officials to investigate allegations contained in a recent criminal indictment accusing five members of the People's Liberation Army with hacking the company's computers and stealing proprietary information.

Prosecutors say that the hackers took SolarWorld's price lists, product designs, and communications between the company and its lawyers in a series of computer incursions that began in 2012. SolarWorld wants Commerce Department officials to question Chinese officials and request documents about Beijing's alleged cyberspying.