Politico

FCC Rejects New York AG Efforts in Comment Quest

Federal Communications Commission General Counsel Thomas Johnson said the agency must “respectfully decline” requests from New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman as part of the AG’s investigation into the fraudulent use of names on comments in the net neutrality rollback proceeding. Johnson said revealing the logs of IP addresses for some comments raises “significant personal privacy concerns” and could also endanger the security of the commission’s comment system.

House Commerce Committee Chairman Walden "deeply disappointed" FCC Commissioner Rosenworcel asked for net neutrality delay

House Commerce Committee Chairman Greg Walden (R-OR) took aim against FCC Commissioner Jessica Rosenworcel, who joined Attorney General Eric Schneiderman (D-NY) to bash fake comments and call for a delay to the Federal Communications Commission vote to repeal net neutrality rules. “There is no reason” for delay, said Chairman Greg Walden. “That is a false issue, and I am deeply disappointed in the role that Commissioner Rosenworcel has decided to play in this matter.

FCC's Pai Steps Up Pitch to Conservatives to Back Net Neutrality Plan

Federal Communications Commission Chairman Ajit Pai is making the rounds to rally supporters behind his plan to roll back the neutrality rules. His efforts include a huddle with House Republicans set for Thursday and a visit to the Senate Republican.

White House paranoid: 'Everyone thinks they’re being recorded'

Paranoia is enveloping the White House and President Donald Trump’s network of former aides and associates as Robert Mueller’s Russia probe heats up.  Former national security adviser Michael Flynn agreed to cooperate with investigators as part of the plea deal he reached last week, adding to the worry already inside Trump’s circle surrounding the secret deal struck earlier this summer by former campaign aide George Papadopoulos, whose cooperation was kept quiet for months before being unsealed in late October.

Taking Net Neutrality to Court

Defenders of the Federal Communications Commission's current Open Internet rules are plotting out a legal challenge to FCC Chairman Ajit Pai’s plan to repeal them. This would be the latest in a series of court battles over FCC net neutrality authority. Several groups including Public Knowledge, Free Press, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, Mozilla and the Computer & Communications Industry Association expressed interest in a legal challenge, which may consume much of 2018.

Aides give up on trying to control President Trump’s tweets

President Donald Trump’s post on Sen Al Franken (D-MN) allegations was the latest example of the president's habit of using his Twitter account to draw fire, rather than deflecting it. Controlling potentially damaging tweets was a job left mostly to the legal team in the early days of the administration. Marc Kasowitz, a former Trump attorney, and Jay Sekulow, a current member of the president's legal team, gave Trump one simple rule to guide his tweeting habit: Don’t comment online about the Russia investigation.

Republican FCC moves to end Obama-era net neutrality rules

Apparently, Federal Communications Commission Chairman Ajit Pai will reveal plans to his fellow commissioners on Nov 21 to fully dismantle the agency's Obama-era network neutrality regulations in a major victory for the telecom industry in the long-running policy debate. The FCC will vote on the proposal in December, some seven months after it laid the groundwork for scuttling the rules that require internet service providers like Comcast or AT&T to treat web traffic equally. Pai’s plan would jettison rules that prohibit ISPs from blocking or slowing web traffic or crea

FCC Defends UHF Discount

The Federal Communications Commission told the DC Circuit Court of Appeals it was reasonable to reinstate the so-called UHF discount in April because it is “inextricably intertwined” with the 39 percent national audience reach limit imposed on broadcasters. Remember, the UHF discount allows broadcasters to count half the reach of UHF TV stations when calculating adherence to that 39 percent limit.

FEC Pushes Tech Giants for Comment

Federal Election Commission member Ellen Weintraub issued personal requests to FacebookGoogle and Twitter to submit a comment aimed at helping inform a rulemaking the FEC is doing on internet ad disclosures. Commissioner Weintraub notes the urgency, since the comment deadline is Nov 9.

Are Bannon’s Ongoing Contacts With President Trump Illegal?

[Commentary] The latest news in the saga of Steve Bannon is that the former White House senior adviser has reportedly been pushing President Donald Trump to be more forceful against special counsel Robert Mueller. Bannon’s ideas allegedly include urging President Trump to cut funding for the probe, telling Trump to withhold documents and pressing Trump to bring in more aggressive lawyers. These latest alleged Bannon-Trump communications come on top of other reported contacts between the two since Bannon left the White House.

President Trump weighs downsizing Spicer’s public role

Apparently, President Donald Trump is considering scaling back White House press secretary Sean Spicer’s public role, as President Trump also weighs a broader shakeup of his communications shop in the wake of several scandals. The press secretary, who has turned into a household name over the past five months and garnered sky-high television ratings for his daily press briefings, has also drawn the ire of the president. He is no longer expected to do a daily, on-camera briefing after President Trump’s foreign trip, which begins May 19.

How President Trump gets his fake news

White House chief of staff Reince Priebus issued a stern warning at a recent senior staff meeting: Quit trying to secretly slip stuff to President Doanld Trump. Just days earlier, KT McFarland, the deputy national security adviser, had given Trump a printout of two Time magazine covers. One, supposedly from the 1970s, warned of a coming ice age; the other, from 2008, about surviving global warming, according to four White House officials familiar with the matter. President Trump quickly got lathered up about the media’s hypocrisy. But there was a problem. The 1970s cover was fake, part of an Internet hoax that’s circulated for years. Staff chased down the truth and intervened before Trump tweeted or talked publicly about it.

The episode illustrates the impossible mission of managing a White House led by an impetuous president who has resisted structure and strictures his entire adult life.

News outlets shut out of Trump meeting with Russians

On the morning of May 10 as controversy swirled over the president abruptly firing his FBI chief amid an investigation of possible ties between Donald Trump's 2016 campaign and Russia, the president met in the Oval Office with none other than Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov and Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak. But the meeting was closed press, meaning the rotating pool of photographers, reporters and camera operators who follow the president weren't allowed in. Yet photos of the three laughing and smiling were soon published by the Russian state news agency TASS. The Russian foreign ministry also tweeted photos of the meeting.

Asked by the print pooler why members of the Russian media were allowed into the meeting but no U.S. press was permitted, a White House official said, "Our official photographer and their official photographer were present, that's it," meaning TASS was considered the Russians' "official photographer."

FCC chairman's first 100 days: full steam ahead on slashing regulations

The roughly 100-day frenzy of deregulation at the Federal Communications Commission marks a bright spot for the Trump Administration, which has been hampered in other areas like repealing Obamacare. And FCC Chairman Ajit Pai shows no signs of slowing down, teeing up a takedown of the signature FCC achievement of the Obama years: network neutrality rules designed to ensure internet service providers treat all web traffic equally.

Could Sinclair launch a Fox News rival?

The Sinclair-Tribune deal has set tongues wagging in Washington (DC) as to whether Sinclair, a Maryland-based television station owner that has often pushed right-leaning programming, will try to position itself as a rival to Fox News.

The Washington Post reported in December that during the 2016 campaign, news stories and features favorable to then-candidate Donald Trump or challenging Democrat Hillary Clinton were distributed to Sinclair stations on a “must-run” basis. Earlier that month, POLITICO reported that the president's son-in-law and adviser, Jared Kushner, told business executives the campaign had struck a deal with Sinclair for better media coverage, a characterization Sinclair disputed. The group also recently hired Boris Epshteyn, a White House aide who oversaw Trump's television surrogate operation, as chief political analyst. Given those recent decisions, many in Washington wonder if Sinclair has its sights set on Fox News.

Democratic operatives unveil new progressive tech incubator

Fearing a tech deficit, a trio of leading Democratic operatives is set to unveil a new organization which will push their party to focus on building political technology that’s not just centered on presidential campaigns. The initiative, named Higher Ground Labs, intends to provide fellowships for up-and-coming progressive political tech entrepreneurs and to invest in young projects that can help benefit down-ballot Democratic candidates as well as presidential ones.

The group will be led by former President Barack Obama's 2012 online organizing director Betsy Hoover, private equity executive and former Obama White House special assistant Shomik Dutta, and Obama White House deputy chief technology officer Andrew McLaughlin — a former top official at tech companies such as Google and Tumblr. Higher Ground Labs says it’s already brought in its first $1 million in commitments.

GOP onslaught on Obama’s ‘midnight rules’ comes to an end

President Donald Trump’s inauguration gave congressional Republicans a once-in-a-generation opportunity to erase a spate of late Obama-era regulations — and they used it to make a significant dent before the legislative window closes in the coming week.

Since February, Republicans have used a once-obscure 1996 law to quash 13 "midnight" regulations on topics such as coal mining pollution, gun rights, internet privacy, Planned Parenthood funding, retirement savings and even bear hunting in Alaska. A 14th rule-blocking resolution is heading toward Trump’s desk, and GOP lawmakers hope to kill at least one more rule, on methane pollution, before the clock runs out May 11.

Sean Spicer Is Doing a Good Job. Here’s Why.

[Commentary] Contrary to popular belief, Spicer is actually doing a good job. Not for reporters or the general public, who disagree with that assessment. But Spicer doesn’t answer to them; he answers to the president. And he has served President Donald Trump well in two important ways. First, Spicer has succeeded in fanning the flames of the feud between Trump’s White House and the media. The other measure of Spicer’s success is his steadfastness in defending the president.

[Neal Urwitz is director of external relations at the Center for a New American Security.]

What the Press Still Doesn’t Get About Trump

What does the press still get wrong about Trump, and what do we just not get at all?

1. We forget what has always driven Trump: Gwenda Blair, author of The Trumps: Three Generations of Builders and a President
2. Trump. Won’t. Change.: Kurt Bardella, president and CEO of Endeavor Strategies
3. We still trust the polls too much: Helmut Norpoth, political scientist at Stony Brook University
4. ‘Trump is crazy’ has become a cliché: John McWhorter, associate professor of linguistics at Columbia University
5. We’re not only stuck in bubbles—social media is making them worse: Emily Parker, former chief strategy officer
6. We’re still ignoring the people who elected Trump: Matthew Continetti, editor in chief of the Washington Free Beacon
7. We’re falling for the ‘Trump exceptionalism’ trap: Nicole Hemmer, assistant professor of presidential studies at the Miller Center at the University of Virginia
8. We should take Trump’s tweets more seriously: Leah Wright Rigueur, assistant professor of public policy at the Harvard Kennedy School of Government
9. The media’s priorities are all wrong: Zeynep Tufekci, associate professor at the University of North Carolina School of Information and Library Science
10. We haven’t nailed the biggest story: Jill Abramson, former executive editor of the New York Times
11. The press is still biased against Trump: Mark Bauerlein, senior editor at First Things and professor of English at Emory University
12. Trump’s success depends just as much on what happens outside Washington: Jessica Yellin, senior fellow at the USC Annenberg Center on Communication Leadership & Policy and former chief White House correspondent for CNN
13. Most people don’t care about Trump’s lies: Terry Sullivan, partner at Firehouse Strategies and campaign manager for Marco Rubio in 2016

The Media Bubble Is Worse Than You Think

The national media really does work in a bubble, something that wasn’t true as recently as 2008. And the bubble is growing more extreme. Concentrated heavily along the coasts, the bubble is both geographic and political. If you’re a working journalist, odds aren’t just that you work in a pro-Clinton county—odds are that you reside in one of the nation’s most pro-Clinton counties. And you’ve got company: If you’re a typical reader of Politico, chances are you’re a citizen of bubbleville, too. The “media bubble” trope might feel overused by critics of journalism who want to sneer at reporters who live in Brooklyn or California and don’t get the “real America” of southern Ohio or rural Kansas. But these numbers suggest it’s no exaggeration: Not only is the bubble real, but it’s more extreme than you might realize. And it’s driven by deep industry trends.

President Trump’s Fake War on the Fake News

On the campaign trail, Donald Trump called the press “dishonest” and “scum.” He defended Russian strongman Vladimir Putin against charges of murdering journalists and vowed to somehow “open up our libel laws” to weaken the First Amendment. Since taking office, he has dismissed unfavorable coverage as “fake news” and described the mainstream media as “the enemy of the American people.” But behind that theatrical assault, the Trump White House has turned into a kind of playground for the press.

We interviewed more than three dozen members of the White House press corps, along with White House staff and outside allies, about the first whirlwind weeks of Trump’s presidency. Rather than a historically toxic relationship, they described a historic gap between the public perception and the private reality. “He built his career by being media-friendly. The last 18 months have been something of an aberration in his approach,” said Newsmax CEO Chris Ruddy, a Trump confidant who has known the president for 20 years. “I’ve always said he’s just creating a negotiating position by calling the press the enemy of the people. I don’t think he believes that deep down.”