August 2015

[Commentary] "Assessing the Health of Local Journalism Ecosystems: A Comparative Analysis of Three New Jersey Communities” -- funded by the Democracy Fund, the Geraldine R. Dodge Foundation, and the Knight Foundation -- took on the ambitious task of trying to locate every single news source in three New Jersey cities (as found online) and then assessed their quality by actually reading them for a one-week period. The report’s findings draw attention to a provocative idea: that lower income communities are drastically underserved when it comes to news, and have fewer news sources than wealthier ones to cover their concerns. The study also suggests that the fewer news sources in a community, the less likely there is to be news coverage of issues critical to informing that community.

The report helps bring attention to the idea of “media deserts.” Like “food deserts” in urban areas where nothing healthy can be found, a media desert or news desert is essentially an uncovered geographical area that has few or no news outlets and receives little coverage. Media deserts can leave “massive unfilled gaps … that create tremendous opportunities for political and corporate corruption to flourish and that undermine effective democratic participation,” according to the report, whose lead author, Philip M. Napoli, teaches in Rutgers’ School of Communication and Information. The report doesn’t definitively answer the question of whether wealthier communities are always better served. More work is needed. But the Rutgers report might help us get there. Its intention was not just to tell us about New Jersey but to create a methodology for looking at communities across the country to assess the health of their media ecosystems. So a measure that combines the availability of journalistic sources, the quantity of journalism output from these sources, and the extent to which this output is original, as presented here, offers a way to begin looking more comprehensively into the concerns raised in the report. The team will next look at a broad range of communities, with the hope of examining 50 to 100 communities across the US.

[Nikki Usher is an assistant professor at George Washington University's School of Media and Public Affairs]

House Commerce Committee Chairman Fred Upton (R-MI) and House Communications Subcommittee Chairman Greg Walden (R-OR), a pair of Republican Representatives who helped come up with the broadcast incentive auction legislation, were among those critical of the Federal Communications Commission's auction procedures framework, which was approved Aug 6 without the support of the two Republicans on the commission. They called it a result that short-changed everyone, including taxpayers, and would be hard to characterize as in the public interest.

Chairman Upton and Chairman Walden said they were troubled by what they called the FCC's decision to "elevate its political desires above the engineering and economic expertise of the industries expected to contribute spectrum and capital to this auction." Among the FCC's decisions were to repack TV stations into wireless spectrum and spectrum being set aside for unlicensed devices, and to reserve some of the best spectrum -- the least subject to interference from repacked TV stations -- into a reserve that the largest carriers -- AT&T and Verizon -- may not get to bid on at all. "Three years ago, Congress put its faith in the FCC to tackle a monumental task: an incentive auction that benefits broadcasters, wireless broadband, and consumers. It appears that faith was misplaced," the pair said in a statement following the vote. "It is beyond belief that the FCC would go down the path of accepting inferior licenses for broadcasters and wireless providers when it doesn’t have to. Once the FCC has reached a level of band pollution that it considers acceptable, their system simply stops trying to make it better," they said. They argued that devalued licenses, marooned broadcasters and displaced unlicensed and wireless mic users appeared to be "acceptable collateral damage" in the FCC majority's view.

Carly Fiorina, the former tech CEO running for President, called on companies such as Apple and Google to cooperate more closely with federal investigators. There should be “more collaboration required between private sector companies and the public sector,” Fiorina said during Aug 6’s first presidential debate for Republican candidates outside the top 10. Silicon Valley and the Obama Administration are battling over whether law enforcement officials should have guaranteed access to encrypted customer data at major tech firms. The FBI and White House have called for some type of legal framework that would ensure access to encrypted communications and information.

They argue that officials are being stymied from getting evidence, even when armed with a warrant, during criminal and national security investigations. But most prominent tech CEOs, such as Apple’s Tim Cook, have made high-profile pitches for strong, universal encryption, in which even the company does not have the ability to look at its customers' communications. Security researchers and technologists have backed up their calls, arguing any guaranteed way in weakens worldwide encryption. Fiorina, who headed tech giant Hewlett-Packard from 1999 to 2005, fought back against that narrative. “I absolutely would call on them to collaborate and cooperate,” she said. Fiorina also claimed that a long-stalled cybersecurity bill, the Cybersecurity Information Sharing Act (CISA), could have prevented some of the recent cyberattacks that have plagued the government and private sector.

The Federal Trade Commission, the de facto federal watchdog for consumers' privacy and data security, knows it needs help. FTC Commissioner Terrell McSweeny and the agency's chief technologist Ashkan Soltani are in Las Vegas (NV) to talk with hackers and security researchers attending the Black Hat and DEF CON conferences. The agency wants their input as it navigates the increasingly complicated digital world in which consumers now live, Commissioner McSweeny says.

Commissioner McSweeny, a former senior aide to Vice President Biden who worked at the White House and the Justice Department before joining the FTC in 2014, sat down to talk about the agency's efforts to recruit more technologists and how the Internet of Things could make the FTC's data security mission even more important. Asked how he would describe the FTC's role in the cybersecurity arena, Commissioner McSweeny said, "Where the FTC comes in is that we protect consumers from unfair and deceptive practices. In the modern, wired context where consumers are connected and online, this means we try to make sure that privacy promises that are made to consumers are honored. It means that if apps or other types of technology are marketed in a deceptive way, we can take action. If consumers' data isn't secured properly that is unfair, it can cause an injury that consumers can't really avoid, those are the cases we can bring."