If there were ever a moment for government leaders who believe that true information unearthed by independent news sources is vital to our nation to stand up and say so, this would be it.
-- Jim Rutenberg, New York Times
BENTON'S COMMUNICATIONS-RELATED HEADLINES for MONDAY, FEBRUARY 27, 2017
Today’s event
Did you catch all of Friday’s news? See The Friday Dump
COMMUNICATIONS AND DEMOCRACY
Will the Real Democracy Lovers Please Stand Up? - analysis
Paul Krugman: Outrage at what’s happening to America isn’t just justified, it’s essential. In fact, it may be our last chance of saving democracy. [links to New York Times]
Protesters Gather to Support the Press, From Fox News to The New York Times
President Trump Embraces ‘Enemy of the People,’ a Phrase With a Fraught History
Assailing the White House From Hollywood’s Glass House [links to Benton summary]
Whose news is fake? Here's the latest in Trump's war with the press [links to Los Angeles Times]
Editorial: Trump's White House press office just put up a velvet rope in front of the media [links to Los Angeles Times]
Opinion: Watch what Trump does about the media, not what he says [links to Los Angeles Times]
Sean Spicer’s credibility problem, in 2 tweets [links to Vox]
Sean Spicer targets own staff in leak crackdown
The remarkable inconsistency of Trump’s attacks on the media
Video: Trump’s relationship with the media since taking office [links to Washington Post]
Trump Ruled the Tabloid Media. Washington Is a Different Story.
Is the Media Too Tough on Donald Trump? More Than Half of Americans Think So [links to Benton summary]
What young conservatives think of the media in the age of Trump [links to CNN]
NBC's Chuck Todd: "Whenever A Story Breaks" On Trump's Ties To Russia, "Press Bashing ... Seems To Escalate" [links to Media Matters for America]
Fox’s Carlson: Trump “Is Probably Right To Be Mad” About Media Coverage Of His Presidency [links to Media Matters for America]
Fox's Shepard Smith: CNN is not 'fake news' [links to Hill, The]
Sen Sanders on Trump's media attacks: He doesn't understand democracy [links to Hill, The]
INTERNET/BROADBAND
Think the Internet Is Polarized? Just Look at the FCC These Days - analysis
Trump’s FCC Pick Is Threatening the Jobs His Boss Promised America - op-ed
Bringing back real consumer protection to the FCC - Roslyn Layton op-ed
Editorial -- Missing: Donald Trump’s Trillion-Dollar Infrastructure Plan [links to New York Times]
GOVERNMENT & COMMUNICATIONS
Trump Will Be First President In 36 Years To Skip White House Correspondents Dinner [links to National Public Radio]
State Department news briefings to resume in early March [links to Associated Press]
OWNERSHIP
Breitbart reveals owners: CEO Larry Solov, the Mercer family and Susie Breitbart [links to Politico]
JOURNALISM
In Trump-CNN Battle, 2 Presidents Who Love a Spectacle [links to New York Times]
CONTENT
The Internet Made ‘Fake News’ a Thing—Then Made It Nothing [links to Wired]
ELECTIONS AND MEDIA
Why Trump's election scares data scientists [links to CNN]
ADVERTISING
For Marketers, TV Sets Are an Invaluable Pair of Eyes
Celebrity Endorsers Turn Political, and Keep Their Deals [links to New York Times]
PRIVACY
Why the FCC delayed new privacy regulations for AT&T, Verizon, and Comcast
WIRELESS
Mobile World Congress 2017: the biggest news from MWC [links to Verge, The]
Coolest tech to see at Barcelona's Mobile World Congress [links to USAToday]
POLICYMAKERS
Donald Trump's 'shadow president' in Silicon Valley: Billionaire iconoclast Peter Thiel's fingerprints are all over the administration. [links to Politico]
STORIES FROM ABROAD
Facebook plans to lay almost 500 miles of fiber cable in Africa for better wireless internet
In Global Expansion, Netflix Makes Friends With Carriers
To Battle Fake News, Ukrainian Show Features Nothing but Lies [links to New York Times]
European Union Parliament passes new rule allowing it to delete hate speech from record [links to Christian Science Monitor]
China’s Huawei Battles to Own the Next Generation of Wireless Technology [links to Wall Street Journal]
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COMMUNICATIONS AND DEMOCRACY
REAL DEMOCRACY LOVER PLEASE STAND UP
[SOURCE: New York Times, AUTHOR: Jim Rutenberg]
[Commentary] The Administration doubled down on its antipress aggression, this time declaring it was “going to get worse every day” for these “globalist” and “corporatist” journalists (and other such gobbledygook from the former Goldman Sachs executive Stephen Bannon). And all the while, so many of the most important and credible leaders in the President’s own party more or less kept their traps shut or looked the other way. If there were ever a moment for government leaders who believe that true information unearthed by independent news sources is vital to our nation to stand up and say so, this would be it.
benton.org/headlines/will-real-democracy-lovers-please-stand | New York Times
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PROTESTING FOR FREE PRESS
[SOURCE: New York Times, AUTHOR: Sarah Maslin Nir]
On the morning of Feb 26, the time when many engage in the weekend ritual of reading the news over coffee, a large crowd converged outside The New York Times’s Manhattan headquarters on Eighth Avenue to defend the country’s press. “It’s a New York Sunday tradition,” read a sign held by Norman Cohen, a freelance TV producer, “Coffee, Bagels, and a FREE PRESS.” The protest, which was led by Get Organized BK, was in response to President Trump’s decision on Feb 24 to bar several news organizations from a White House briefing, including The Times. Protesters walked from The Times to the offices of Fox News and The Wall Street Journal, and then to NBC’s headquarters at 30 Rockefeller Plaza before returning to The Times building. Protesters made it clear that they championed press freedom for all outlets, regardless of political leaning. Some had masking tape over their mouths, symbolizing a muzzling of the press.
benton.org/headlines/protesters-gather-support-press-fox-news-new-york-times | New York Times
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ENEMY OF THE PEOPLE
[SOURCE: New York Times, AUTHOR: Andrew Higgins]
The phrase was too toxic even for Nikita Khrushchev, a war-hardened veteran communist not known for squeamishness. As leader of the Soviet Union, he demanded an end to the use of the term “enemy of the people” because “it eliminated the possibility of any kind of ideological fight.” “The formula ‘enemy of the people,’” Khrushchev told the Soviet Communist Party in a 1956 speech denouncing Stalin’s cult of personality, “was specifically introduced for the purpose of physically annihilating such individuals” who disagreed with the supreme leader. It is difficult to know if President Donald Trump is aware of the historic resonance of the term, a label generally associated with despotic communist governments rather than democracies. But his decision to unleash the terminology has left some historians scratching their heads. Why would the elected leader of a democratic nation embrace a label that, after the death of Stalin, even the Soviet Union found to be too freighted with sinister connotations? By using the phrase and placing himself in such infamous company, at least in his choice of vocabulary to attack his critics, President Trump has demonstrated that the language of “autocracy, of state nationalism is always the same regardless of the country, and no nation is exempt.”
benton.org/headlines/president-trump-embraces-enemy-people-phrase-fraught-history | New York Times
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LEAK CRACKDOWN
[SOURCE: Politico, AUTHOR: Annie Karni, Alex Isenstadt]
Press secretary Sean Spicer is cracking down on leaks coming out of the West Wing, with increased security measures that include random phone checks of White House staffers, overseen by White House attorneys. After Spicer became aware that information had leaked out of a planning meeting with about a dozen of his communications staffers, he reconvened the group in his office to express his frustration over the number of private conversations and meetings that were showing up in unflattering news stories. Upon entering Spicer’s office for what was described as “an emergency meeting,” staffers were told to dump their phones on a table for a “phone check," to prove they had nothing to hide. He explicitly warned staffers that using texting apps like Confide — an encrypted and screenshot-protected messaging app that automatically deletes texts after they are sent — and Signal, another encrypted messaging system, was a violation of the Presidential Records Act. Spicer also warned the group of more problems if news of the phone checks and the meeting about leaks was leaked to the media.
benton.org/headlines/sean-spicer-targets-own-staff-leak-crackdown | Politico
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INCONSISTENCY OF ATTACKS
[SOURCE: Washington Post, AUTHOR: Callum Borchers]
President Donald Trump just can't get his story straight. At the Conservative Political Action Conference, he accused the news media of widespread fabrication, claiming without evidence that “they have no sources; they just make 'em up when there are none.” The charge is wholly incompatible with his assertions, at other times (or on the same day), that U.S. intelligence officials are leaking classified information to reporters — and must be ferreted out. Which is it? Are the unidentified intelligence sources cited in reports by The Washington Post, the New York Times, CNN and others invented by “dishonest” journalists? Or are they real people, providing real information, who need to be stopped? Both of the president's claims cannot be true. It seems clear which one President Trump actually believes: He speaks and tweets so frequently about plugging leaks that his consternation appears genuine.
benton.org/headlines/remarkable-inconsistency-trumps-attacks-media | Washington Post
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NOT IN MANHATTAN ANYMORE
[SOURCE: New York Times, AUTHOR: Glenn Thrush, Michael Grynbaum]
The White House press secretary, Sean Spicer, has taken to slapping journalists who write unflattering stories with an epithet he sees as the epitome of low-road, New York Post-style gossip: “Page Six reporter.” Whether the New England-bred spokesman realizes it or not, the expression is perhaps less an insult than a reminder of an era when Donald Trump mastered the New York tabloid terrain — and his own narrative — shaping his image with a combination of on-the-record bluster and off-the-record gossip. He’s not in Manhattan anymore. This New York-iest of politicians, now an idiosyncratic, write-your-own-rules president, has stumbled into the most conventional of Washington traps: believing he can master an entrenched political press corps with far deeper connections to the permanent government of federal law enforcement and executive department officials than he has. Instead, President Trump has found himself subsumed and increasingly infuriated by the leaks and criticisms he has long prided himself on vanquishing. Now, goaded by Stephen K. Bannon, his chief strategist, President Trump has turned on the news media with escalating rhetoric, labeling major outlets as “the enemy of the American people.”
benton.org/headlines/trump-ruled-tabloid-media-washington-different-story | New York Times
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INTERNET/BROADBAND/TELECOM
FCC POLARIZATION
[SOURCE: Wired, AUTHOR: Klint Finley]
[Commentary] The Federal Communications Commission’s rise from relative obscurity to big headlines corresponds not just with the Trump’s arrival in Washington, but with the ever-greater centrality of the internet to American life, political and otherwise. From its start in 1934, the FCC has played a crucial role in determining how Americans communicate and gather information. But for most of its existence, it’s been a boring, technocratic agency tasked with granting broadcast licenses and divvying up the wireless spectrum. It occasionally waded into controversies like obscenity laws, media consolidation rules, or the Fairness Doctrine, but even when decisions followed party lines, they rarely became political firestorms. But these days, the FCC has grown increasingly polarized—and polarizing. The agency that regulates the internet is becoming as sharply divided as the internet itself. You can’t blame petty politics alone for the mess the FCC finds itself in. Debates over net neutrality and cable boxes stem from an ideological shift in Washington. In earlier days, it was “good regulation versus bad regulation,” says Chris Lewis, vice president of the consumer advocacy group Public Knowledge. Now it’s “more regulation versus less regulation.” The Trump administration has signaled a hard shift in the direction of deregulation, though it may occasionally come down in favor of government intervention when politically desirable. FCC Chairman Ajit Pai’s outlook is clearly in line with administration. But he, like the president and Congress, have an obligation to the public, not just to the Republican base or to free market ideology. No one, not even the telecommunication industry, is well served by regulations that yo-yo back and forth as the political seasons change. The internet, at least in this case, should really be above politics.
benton.org/headlines/think-internet-polarized-just-look-fcc-these-days | Wired
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PAI, NET NEUTRALITY AND UNIVERSAL ACCESS
[SOURCE: Medium, AUTHOR: Kira Goldenberg]
[Commentary] To meet the loss of the manufacturing industry, tech jobs are going to have to move outside of Silicon Valley, to the center of the country. This shift, however, won’t just happen—it depends on oversight by the Federal Communications Commission. The FCC ensures that internet access for ex-coal guys in Kentucky looks the same as it does for Mark Zuckerberg. This uniformity, called open access, is key: It helps level the playing field for people who live outside urban tech centers but nonetheless need to make a living in an digitized economy. It’s also necessary if you want to, say, create a tech hub in Kentucky. “I have been to coal country,” says Tom Wheeler, who served as FCC chairman during Barack Obama’s second term. “I have met with miners who are now coders. I have been to small towns where, because they were able to build high-speed fiber optic connections, there are more people working now than at the height of the coal boom.” It doesn’t make inherent business sense to build broadband in rural areas. But part of the way the FCC oversees open access is by treating internet like a public utility—meaning that everyone has to get access to it. But protecting those tenets makes little business sense if you’re AT&T, or Comcast, or Verizon. It makes much more sense to charge a captive audience as much as possible. Some can’t afford to play that game? Not their concern.
benton.org/headlines/trumps-fcc-pick-threatening-jobs-his-boss-promised-america | Medium
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FCC AND CONSUMER PROTECTION
[SOURCE: American Enterprise Institute, AUTHOR: Roslyn Layton]
There are literally millions of consumer complaints about robocalls, a doubling over the last 5 years, but just a few thousand about network neutrality. That the Federal Communications Commission has focused on net neutrality and allowed robocalls to grow worse seems patently anti-consumer. Fortunately the new Republican-led FCC is poised to address what consumers actually care about rather than a crony capitalist agenda of pseudo consumer protection.
[Roslyn Layton is a PhD Fellow at the Center for Communication, Media, and Information Technologies (CMI) at Aalborg University in Copenhagen, Denmark. She is also a member of the Trump Administration’s FCC Transition team.]
benton.org/headlines/bringing-back-real-consumer-protection-fcc | American Enterprise Institute
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ADVERTISING
TV PRIVACY
[SOURCE: New York Times, AUTHOR: Sapna Maheshwari]
TVision — which has worked with the Weather Channel, NBC and the Disney ABC Television Group — is one of several companies that have entered living rooms in recent years, emerging with new, granular ways for marketers to understand how people are watching television and, in particular, commercials. The appeal of this information has soared as Americans rapidly change their viewing habits, streaming an increasing number of shows weeks or months after they first air, on devices as varied as smartphones, laptops and Roku boxes, not to mention TVs. Through the installation of a Microsoft Kinect device, normally used for Xbox video games, on top of participants’ TVs, TVision tracks the movement of people’s eyes in relation to the television. The device’s sensors can record minute shifts for all the people in the room. The company then matches those viewing patterns to shows and commercials using technology that listens to what is being broadcast on the TV. “The big thing for TV advertisers and the networks is: Are you actually looking at the screen or not?” said Dan Schiffman, the chief revenue officer of TVision. “What you looked at is interesting, but the fact that you looked away is arguably the most interesting.”
benton.org/headlines/marketers-tv-sets-are-invaluable-pair-eyes | New York Times
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PRIVACY
DELAYING PRIVACY RULES
[SOURCE: Christian Science Monitor, AUTHOR: Patrick Reilly]
By stepping back from Obama-era privacy rules, the Trump Administration’s Federal Communications Commission has made another decision that’s likely to benefit internet service providers, but not internet users. Former FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler, who authored the privacy rules, made clear that he’s still concerned about Internet users’ privacy. "The fact of the matter is it's the consumer's information," he said. "It's not the network's information."
benton.org/headlines/why-fcc-delayed-new-privacy-regulations-att-verizon-and-comcast | Christian Science Monitor
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STORIES FROM ABROAD
FACEBOOK FIBER IN AFRICA
[SOURCE: Vox, AUTHOR: Kurt Wagner]
Facebook has a new plan to get more of Africa online: Fiber optic cables. The company announced plans to lay nearly 500 miles of fiber cable in Uganda by the end of the year, infrastructure that Facebook believes will provide internet access for more than 3 million people. Facebook is not, however, providing its own wireless network. The company is partnering with Airtel and BCS to provide the actual internet service, and says the fiber will offer more support for “mobile operators’ base stations.” The company also says that it’s “open” to working with other network providers down the line. All three organizations are making some kind of financial commitment to the project, though it’s unclear who is paying for what. The move to dig up ground and lay physical fiber cables is the latest in a string of efforts Facebook has made over the past two years to get more people online. Facebook’s mission is to connect everyone in the world with its social network, but that’s hard to do if significant portions of the world don’t have internet access.
benton.org/headlines/facebook-plans-lay-almost-500-miles-fiber-cable-africa-better-wireless-internet | Vox
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NETFLIX MAKES FRIENDS WITH CARRIERS
[SOURCE: New York Times, AUTHOR: Mark Scott]
Negotiations will Internet service providers have become increasingly commonplace for Netflix as its global ambitions have taken the content streaming service far from its California roots into markets across Europe, Latin America and Asia. The company’s partnerships with cable and cellphone operators worldwide give it almost instantaneous access to potential new users without having to spend a fortune on advertising and distribution deals in markets where its brand and content are often still relatively unknown. This growing symbiotic relationship will take center stage when Reed Hastings, the company’s chief executive, gives the keynote address on the first day of the Mobile World Congress. The conference is an annual trade show in Barcelona, Spain, where executives from across the telecom, media and technology worlds gather to meet and, potentially, sign new deals.
benton.org/headlines/global-expansion-netflix-makes-friends-carriers | New York Times
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