Government & Communications

There is one way that cities could ensure at least a modicum of local reporting: Just set up their own municipally-owned papers. Journalism is not that expensive. Even small cities could easily muster up enough cash to get a municipal paper started. Here's how it could work: A municipality would set up a public journalism corporation operating on an independent, nonprofit basis, and seed it with some public revenue. On a steady financial footing — and not subject to the ludicrous profit demands of some hedge fund goon — they could build out or stabilize a basic reporting outfit.

The House Communications Subcommittee held a long-delayed Federal Communications Commission oversight hearing July 25. Overall, the review of the FCC was split along partisan lines. Republican representatives generally expressed satisfaction with the work of the FCC over the last nine months. Democratic representatives felt differently.  The hearing touched on a variety of policy issues, from spectrum allocation, to cybersecurity, to emergency alerts.

[Commentary] CNN is sui generis as a target of President Donald Trump’s onslaught against the press. It’s a serially abusive situation.

Comcast recently installed Wi-Fi equipment in public rights of way without permits in the city of Corvallis (OR). But instead of settling the matter locally, NCTA—The Internet & Television Association, the cable industry's chief lobby group, told the Federal Communications Commission that it should override municipal permitting processes such as the one in Corvallis. In doing so, the cable lobby group made "misleading and inaccurate" allegations about what actually happened in the Comcast/Corvallis dispute, according to city officials.

[Commentary] Of all the mind-dizzying hypocrisies that have emanated from President Donald Trump’s communications office, it is hard to find any more outlandish than claiming to “support a free press” while barring a reporter from an open White House event simply because it didn’t like her questions. Outlandish, but not laughable; there’s nothing amusing about the administration’s retaliation against CNN correspondent Kaitlan Collins.

Saying it was so the "fake news doesn't waste my time with dumb questions," President Donald Trump said NO, he did NOT (tweeted emphasis) have knowledge of a June 2016 meeting between his son and Russians saying they had dirt on Hillary Clinton. "....,the only Collusion with Russia was with the Democrats, so now they are looking at my Tweets (along with 53 million other people) - the rigged Witch Hunt continues! How stupid and unfair to our Country....And so the Fake News doesn’t waste my time with dumb questions, NO,...."" .....I did NOT know of the meeting with my son, Don jr.

Fox News chief news anchor Shepard Smith pushed back on escalating tensions between the news media and the Trump White House, declaring that "journalists are not the enemies of the people." "For those of you at home, if I may, journalists are not the enemies of the people. It's quite the opposite," Smith said. "Our profession is enshrined in the Constitution and the fourth estate holds the essential job of being your eyes and often ears and, when appropriate, your voice.

President Donald Trump threatened a government investigation of Twitter. The President tweeted on the morning of July 26, "Twitter 'SHADOW BANNING' prominent Republicans. Not good. We will look into this discriminatory and illegal practice at once!

Listen to the ongoing conversations on net neutrality, and you’ll notice that the United States, like other liberal-democratic countries, believes that, in the lexicon of policymakers, a free, open, interoperable, secure, and resilient internet can be a torchbearer for an open society—and democracy more broadly.

Twitter appears to have adjusted its platform to no longer limit the visibility of some prominent Republicans in its search results, a problem that the company said was a side effect of its attempts to clean up discourse on its platform. Those affected included RNC Chair Ronna McDaniel, Republican Reps. Mark Meadows, Jim Jordan, Matt Gaetz, along with Andrew Surabian, Donald Trump Jr.’s spokesman and former Special Assistant to the President. The profiles did populate when entering a full search but not not in the more visible search menu.