Gender

At the early days of my doctoral study and fellowship at the Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism, University of Southern California (USC) over two years ago, I conducted a 10-month field research to understand the dynamics of digital access and use among people experiencing homelessness in Los Angeles. It was the first time I witnessed a massive number of houseless individuals and families residing on the street and struggling to sustain their lives on minimal sustenance and digital means.

On April 17, the FCC and the National Association of Broadcasters each filed a petition asking the Supreme Court to review the United States Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit’s 2019 decision in Prometheus Radio Project v. FCC. The decision was the fourth in a line of intertwined cases dealing with the agency’s media ownership policies since 2004. In Prometheus IV, the Third Circuit remanded the diametrically opposed FCC’s media ownership decisions in 2016 and 2017, as well as the agency’s 2018 incubator program.

The Solicitor General of the United States, on behalf of the Federal Communications Commission, has asked the Supreme Court to review a US Third Circuit Court of Appeals decision overturning most of the FCC's media ownership deregulation decision, hammering the circuit for what the FCC suggested was serial obstruction of what it had concluded was in the public interest. The FCC said that it has been trying to grant the ownership deregulation for 17 years, thwarted by a series of decisions by a divided panel of the Third Circuit.

Broadband is seen as a vector of economic growth and social development. In the developing world, mobile technologies are widely adopted and mobile broadband is progressively rolled-out with high expectations on its impact on the countries’ development. We highlight what the determinants of mobile broadband use are in four Sub-Saharan countries. Using micro-level data coming from household surveys over 5 years, from 2013 to 2017, we show that SIM card ownership and being part of an online social community has a strong positive impact on mobile broadband use.

When the world celebrated the web’s 30th birthday a year ago, we were reminded of the incredible things it has enabled — and all that we stand to lose if we don’t fight for it. I asked everyone to join together and do what they can to make sure the next 30 years of the web is even greater than the last.

Until today, the latest broadcast station ownership data reported by the Federal Communications Commission was from 2015. While I am pleased that we finally have updated numbers to talk about, it is still an unacceptable lag of more than two years in our reporting on data from Oct 2017. To effectively address the lack of media ownership diversity, we cannot use stale data and must get better at assessing the extent of the problem in a timely manner.

The Federal Communications Commission’s Media Bureau released its fourth report on the ownership of broadcast stations. The data contained in the report provide a tabulation of station ownership based on information submitted by licensees on FCC Form 323 and Form 323-E in response to the 2017 biennial ownership report filing window, which closed in March 2018. This filing window was the first to collect information from non-commercial educational stations about the gender, ethnicity, and race of the licensee’s attributable interest holders.

The House Communications Subcommittee was in agreement that more needed to be done to boost minority media ownership, but Republican members focused more on what they said broadcasters and cable operators were already doing to address the issue. The hearing, "Lifting Voices: Legislation to Promote Media Marketplace Diversity", looked at various bipartisan bills to promote more diversity data collection and analysis at the Federal Communications Commission and provide more access to capital. 

1. Social media sites have emerged as a go-to platform for connecting with others, finding news and engaging politically. 
2. Around the world and in the US, social media has become a key tool for activists, as well as those aligned against them.
3. Smartphones have altered the way many Americans go online. 
4. Growth in mobile and social media use has sparked debates about the impact of screen time on America’s youth – and others.
5. Data privacy and surveillance have become major concerns in the post-Snowden era.

Though women and minorities constitute an increasingly large portion of our country’s populace, ownership of broadcast media remains dominated by white males. The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) has long ignored its congressional mandate to ensure a diversity of media viewpoints and continues to disregard orders from federal courts to increase women and minority participation in media ownership. The time has long passed for Congress to act.