Los Angeles Times

Hillary Clinton was the choice of nearly every American newspaper editorial board. It didn’t matter. When it comes to influencing public opinion, the 2016 presidential election demonstrated with sobering effect the weakening role of traditional media and the ascendant power of social networks like Facebook.

Forty-four percent of Americans get their news from Facebook, according to the Pew Research Center, filling a void left by the declining ranks of newspapers. By comparison, only 2 in 10 U.S. adults get news from print newspapers today. The consequences of Facebook’s growing sway became clear during an election cycle that saw the rise of partisan news, conspiracies, fake articles and a winning candidate who fully embraced social media as a way to circumvent the media establishment and its proclivity for checking facts. The problem with rumors and fake news grew so acute that President Obama felt the need to address it. The question now is whether Facebook and other social media platforms have the responsibility to stop, or at least identify to readers, phony news. That’s eliciting some reflection in Silicon Valley, which has always advocated a laissez faire approach to information.

Musical artists are reacting with outrage at the dismissal of the head of the US Copyright Office, calling the move an aggressive attack that is part of a larger effort to erode their creative rights and bolster advocates of free content.

"This is a major affront to copyright," said songwriter and music publisher Dean Kay. "Google seems to be taking over the world — and politics ... Their major position is to allow themselves to use copyright material without remuneration. If the Copyright Office head is toeing the Google line, creators are going to get hurt." The Copyright Office administers the complex set of rules governing US copyrights and advises Congress on policy and legal issues. It is a federal department within the Library of Congress. New Librarian of Congress Carla Hayden in Oct abruptly removed Maria Pallante from the position she had held since 2011 and reassigned her to a role of "senior advisor." Pallante resigned three days later.

AT&T’s blockbuster bid for Time Warner might be a boon for investment bankers, lawyers and lobbyists, but it is anyone’s guess whether investors, employees and consumers ultimately would benefit from the combination. AT&T estimated that it could achieve $1 billion in cost savings in three years after buying Time Warner. AT&T CEO Randall Stephenson promised the merger would transform media because AT&T would be able to create new subscription and advertising models. Time Warner movies and popular TV shows like “The Big Bang Theory” could be promoted to AT&T cellphone customers. But some analysts have expressed doubts that such a massive tie-up will pan out the way that Stephenson and Time Warner CEO Jeffrey Bewkes hope — should the federal regulators allow the two companies to come together.

There’s good reason for skepticism: Many mergers fail to live up to the hype. “Most of them don’t work out,” said Rita Gunther McGrath, a management professor at Columbia Business School. “And the success rates for the big ones are abysmal.” Problems include challenges integrating disparate business units, conflicts in corporate culture and getting beat by rivals who respond faster to changes in market conditions.

Cable television company Comcast gained customers in the third quarter, bucking industry trends, and its broadcast of the Rio Summer Olympics hauled in $1.6 billion in revenue. Comcast announced that it gained a net 32,000 cable television subscribers during the July-through-September quarter, compared with a loss of 48,000 in the same quarter in 2015. The industry leader also gained 330,000 high-speed Internet customers, a slight increase over the year-earlier quarter. Comcast now has 28 million customers.

The company’s stock, however, was down $1.59, or 2.5%, to $62.94 around 8:30 a.m. Pacific time. Wall Street analysts have been eager to hear whether AT&T’s blockbuster $85.4-billion deal to buy Time Warner Inc. might prompt Comcast to rush out and buy a wireless phone company such as T-Mobile or Sprint to achieve the same kind of scale. Over the years, Comcast has been more acquisitive than most media conglomerates, buying entertainment company NBCUniversal in 2011 and DreamWorks Animation last summer.

[Commentary] If federal authorities play this correctly, the AT&T-Time Warner merger actually could be beneficial for consumers.

What they should do is press the case for skinny bundles and a la carte channels.

Despite all the political posturing, I expect the deal ultimately to be approved. There’s not a lot of overlap in AT&T’s and Time Warner’s operations, so the most troublesome element is creation of a corporate behemoth of Monster Island proportions. To address that, the Justice Department and Federal Communications Commission almost certainly will impose a number of conditions to make the deal more palatable, including divestiture of some properties and commitments to play nice with other kids. Because a merged AT&T-Time Warner would cast such a long shadow over the telecom and media industries, a requirement that the company offer smaller, reasonably priced programming packages and break off popular channels on an a la carte basis could have a sweeping effect on other pay-TV players.

“It’s always the case that when one party does something that’s more pro-consumer, others will follow,” said John Bergmayer, senior counsel at the advocacy group Public Knowledge.

Most media mergers end with the old regime getting shoved out the door. But AT&T’s top executive says he plans to keep in place much of Time Warner’s management team.

AT&T unveiled its blockbuster $84.5-billion acquisition of Time Warner this weekend, and the heads of both companies — AT&T Chairman and Chief Executive Randall Stephenson and Time Warner Chairman and Chief Executive Jeffrey Bewkes — quickly said that maintaining the executive ranks of the media company would be a priority. “I made it clear to Jeff that the talent that he assembled was a really important part of this deal,” Stephenson said. “And it was going to be really critical that we have continuity in the team that he has built.” Senior Time Warner executives — including Warner Bros. Chairman Kevin Tsujihara in Burbank (CA), HBO Chairman Richard Plepler in New York, and Turner Chairman John Martin in New York -- should be breathing easier. And Bewkes expects to hang around for some time, too. “We have both been really focused on keeping all of the Time Warner executives — the business executives and the creative executives — going forward for the long term,” Bewkes said.

Facebook and Snapchat have overtaken the home pages of Yahoo and Google as the front door to the Internet for hundreds of millions of people. Now, the two rivals are pursuing a much bigger challenge: surpassing television to become the dominant gateway to video.

Tech firms see video as the next frontier of their business. U.S. adults still spend four times as much time watching TV as they do digital video. And U.S. advertisers put seven times as many dollars toward TV ads as they spend online. The aging of millennials, and Gen Z behind them, naturally could close the gaps. But app makers and video producers will have to make strides in creative and business concepts too. Whether they stand a chance is being tested in small studios and corners of offices around the world, including in Venice (CA).

[Commentary] It’s curious to see lawmakers who are otherwise zealous promoters of deregulation and free markets argue against privatizing the world’s most important communications medium. More important, they’re wrong about the facts and wrong about the effect of stopping the planned transition.

Simply put, the US government doesn’t control any aspect of the Internet today, and it hasn’t for years. Yes, an entity it nominally supervises — the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority — manages the master online address list that organizes the virtual location of sites and services online. And that master list helps assure that the Internet remains an interconnected whole, not splintered into separate regional networks with incompatible addresses and protocols — a key factor in the Internet’s transformative power. But the federal government turned over management of the numbers authority long ago to a California not-for-profit organization, the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers. Significantly, ICANN was created to transfer issues related to Internet addresses and traffic management from the U.S. government into the hands of Internet “stakeholders” — online service providers, data equipment vendors, user groups and the like.

Ted Cruz’s crusade to maintain the limited amount of supervision the federal government exercises over Internet addresses could yield the exact opposite of what he says he wants to accomplish. Repressive regimes already wield excessive but imperfect control over the Internet within their borders. To prevent them from gaining even more leverage over global data traffic, the best route is to limit all governments’ role in the management of Internet names and addresses. Congress should let the administration give up what little ministerial power it holds over the Internet’s technical functions and allow a more accountable ICANN to move forward.

[Commentary] Earlier in 2016, the Federal Communications Commission launched a process to unlock the set-top-box marketplace. We were motivated by the desire to give consumers relief, but we were also mandated to take action by Congress and the law, which says that consumers should be able to choose their preferred device to access pay-TV programming. Over the past seven months, the Commission conducted an open proceeding where we heard from pay-TV providers, programmers, device and software manufacturers, consumers groups, and, most important, the American people. We listened.

Now, I am proposing rules that would end the set-top-box stranglehold. If adopted, consumers will no longer have to rent a set-top box, month after month. Instead, pay-TV providers will be required to provide apps – free of charge– that consumers can download to the device of their choosing to access all the programming and features they already paid for. If you want to watch Comcast’s content through your Apple TV or Roku, you can. If you want to watch DirectTV’s offerings through your Xbox, you can. If you want to pipe Verizon’s service directly to your smart TV, you can. And if you want to watch your current pay-TV package on your current set-top box, you can do that, too. The choice is yours. No longer will you be forced to rent set-top boxes from your pay-TV provider.

[Tom Wheeler is the 31st chairman of the Federal Communications Commission.]

[Commentary] Cable and telecommunications companies chalked up their biggest victory yet — in a courtroom, not a legislative chamber. The 6th Circuit US Court of Appeals shut down an effort by the Federal Communications Commission to foster the spread of municipal broadband. The FCC, arguing that the public interest was served by more competition in the broadband market, had tried to overturn state laws in Tennessee and North Carolina blocking the creation or expansion of municipal systems.

But what’s intriguing about the ruling is that it accepted the FCC’s reasoning that competition from municipal systems works well. The restrictions imposed by Tennessee and North Carolina were “onerous,” agreed Judge John M. Rogers, writing for the court. Thanks to this week’s appeals court ruling, supporters of community broadband will have to continue their work without the assistance of the FCC. But by providing lousy service, the cable and telecommunications industries may make their job easier.