December 2016

The House has passed a bill with a directive likely to get action in a Trump Federal Communications Commission given the President-elect's commitment to helping out veterans. The Improving Broadband Access for Veterans Act of 2016 (HR 6394) passed the House on suspension of the rules, a way to fast-track noncontroversial bills that limits debate, prevents amendments, and requires a 2/3 majority for passage.

It requires the FCC to study and report back to Congress on the availability of broadband access to veterans. The FCC has a year from enactment--the bill still needs to pass the Senate and be signed by the President--to report back to Congress on access, particularly for low-income vets and ones living in rural areas, where there is the toughest business case for building out networks. But the FCC would have to do more than produce a state of the marketplace report. Congress wants recommendations on how to promote access. The FCC won't have the full year to work on the report. It is required to put it out for public comment before submitting it.

Since the 1970s, the term “information overload” has captured society’s anxiety about the growth in the production of information having potentially bad consequences for people as they struggle to cope with seemingly constant streams of messages and images. A new Pew Research Center survey finds that, for the most part, the large majority of Americans do not feel that information overload is a problem for them.

Some 20% say they feel overloaded by information, a decline from the 27% figure from a decade ago, while 77% say they like having so much information at their fingertips. Two-thirds (67%) say that having more information at their disposals actually helps to simplify their lives. The survey shows that most Americans are comfortable with their abilities to cope with information flows in their day-to-day lives. Moreover, those who own more devices are also the ones who feel more on top of the data and media flows in their lives. Those who are more likely to feel information overload have less technology and are poorer, less well-educated and older.

It did not take long after election night for the donations to start pouring in to America’s nonprofit journalism organizations. Almost a month later, the money keeps coming, in $10 and $20 and sometimes hundreds of dollars or more from small donors all over the country. At ProPublica, the investigative news organization that pledges to hold the powerful accountable, the postelection haul, $750,000, has easily eclipsed the total raised from small-dollar donors in all of 2015, about $500,000. The list goes on.

From local public radio affiliates to established watchdog groups to start-ups that focus on a single issue, nonprofit, nonpartisan media is having a moment. Just what is motivating these donors — whether it is a partisan response to the election of Donald J. Trump or a broader concern over the viability of a troubled industry — is a matter of speculation, executives say. But one thing seems increasingly clear: Independent accountability journalism is gaining new support among many Americans mulling the election’s outcome and the country’s political divide.

It quickly became undeniable that the alt-right was no longer a small-time fringe group that lived on Twitter and 4chan — it had evolved into a formidable movement with political clout in the White House, all while openly spouting messages of white supremacy, xenophobia, misogyny, and other extreme ideas. News organizations know their decisions about how to describe a modern group with an age-old racist message will shape how Americans understood it.