September 2017

The John S. and James L. Knight Foundation announced a major initiative to support the role of strong, trusted journalism as essential to a healthy democracy. The initiative is anchored by the Knight Commission on Trust, Media and Democracy, a panel of thinkers and doers from diverse backgrounds committed to creating more informed and engaged communities. This nonpartisan commission will explore causes for the erosion of trust in democratic institutions, in particular the press. It will also identify new thinking and solutions around rebuilding trust.

The Knight Commission will be chaired by Jamie Woodson, executive chairman and CEO of Tennessee’s State Collaborative on Reforming Education, and Tony Marx, president of The New York Public Library, the largest public library in the nation and the most used library system in the world. It will be run by the Aspen Institute, with $2 million in support from Knight. The initiative also includes the Knight Prototype Fund, which fosters accurate information in media and announced a new round of winners in June 2017, and Newsmatch, a partnership with Democracy Fund to support nonprofit news and investigative news outlets with matching grants during the end-of-year giving period; Newsmatch was initially launched by Knight in December 2016. Knight plans to build on the initiative further with the help of the commission and other partners.

Significant theories of democratic accountability hinge on how political campaigns affect Americans' candidate choices. We argue that the best estimate of the effects of campaign contact and advertising on Americans' candidates choices in general elections is zero.

First, a systematic meta-analysis of 40 field experiments estimates an average effect of zero in general elections. Second, we present nine original field experiments that increase the statistical evidence in the literature about the persuasive effects of personal contact 10-fold. These experiments' average effect is also zero. In both existing and our original experiments, persuasive effects only appear to emerge in two rare circumstances. First, when candidates take unusually unpopular positions and campaigns invest unusually heavily in identifying persuadable voters. Second, when campaigns contact voters long before election day and measure effects immediately---although this early persuasion decays. These findings contribute to ongoing debates about how political elites influence citizens' judgments.

Technology doesn’t always cooperate with us when we want it to. And sometimes governments don’t want to cooperate with it, either. At the United Nation’s High-Level Event on Innovation and Technology various snafus reinforced a key point that recurred at various conferences during UNGA week: That all the talk of using technology to fight poverty, hunger, and gender inequality is useless if we can’t get over the most basic hurdle—universal access to the internet, which less than half the world currently has. Only then can we attempt to use our digital savvy to tackle the 17 sustainable development goals (SDGs), the UN’s ambitious framework for solving global problems by 2030.

In order to achieve any of this, however, technology leaders in the private sector and government leaders in the public sector are going to have to learn how to get along. Traditionally positioned as opponents at opposite ends of the ring—the private sector wanting to make a profit, the public sector wanting to make a difference—UNGA treated both as equals and encouraged them to shake hands instead of throw punches. True, lasting, global change isn’t the responsibility of either party alone, but to move forward, they’re going to have to find some middle ground on the following issues.

[Commentary] For years politicians (both Republicans and Democrats), regulators, telecom providers, and just about anyone who uses a cellular phone or Wi-Fi have been saying that the US needs more radio spectrum for commercial two-way communications. Steps are being taken — for example, the Federal Communications Commission conducted an incentive auction to move radio spectrum from broadcasting to two-way communications. Another strategy would be to loosen regulatory controls on radio spectrum markets.

Current practice is a “rights to use” model. Since licensing is really about managing interference, licenses could deal with this directly with something like a “rights to interfere and rights to not be interfered with” approach. Company A’s license could read something like: “Don’t cause more than X interference in radio spectrum bands Y and Z without the agreement of Companies B and C.” So as long as A, B, and C are happy, the FCC would be happy, too.

[Mark Jamison is the director and Gunter Professor of the Public Utility Research Center at the University of Florida’s Warrington College of Business.]