Lauren Frayer

As the White House reeled on May 16 from a chaotic 24 hours, bookended by a pair of bombshell scoops raising serious questions about President Trump’s comportment in the Oval Office, the administration and its surrogates quickly settled on a blunt message: Blame the press.

Doing battle with journalists has become a frequent tactic of the Trump White House. But the conflict has been heightened this week, as aides to the president — and their supporters in the right-wing press — seek to shift focus onto questions about the use of confidential sources and the credibility of the news media, and away from concerns about Trump’s behavior.

[Commentary] Every new administration complains that the daily briefing is a charade that allows the media to batter the White House’s policy. Yet no matter how badly the press secretary is doing, no president has gone so far as to cancel it. The reason is that the briefing is a powerful weapon against the opposition and Congress.

Since President Donald Trump is willing to serve as his own unfiltered spokesman, giving interviews and pecking out late-night tweets, he doesn’t need the briefing to inform the world about the ever-changing presidential agenda. But the briefing still offers the White House a chance to control the political conversation and play out its chosen narrative: that unfair reporters are trying to bully an administration they don’t like. What’s in it for the press? Under President Trump the briefings have become ratings dynamite, as journalists try to one-up each other and catch the White House in any contradiction. Still, there’s no reason the media should make them such major events.

The big stories aren’t going to be broken in the briefing room, through an official statement or at a scheduled time. Instead of being stuck for an hour trying to ask a single pointed question to a harried and seemingly ill-informed spokesman, the White House press corps would be better off going out and looking for stories. For the country as a whole, ending the briefing would be a positive step. It would help break the public’s presidential obsession and free the press corps to pursue other stories. Without the distraction of a daily performance by the press secretary, Americans might learn more about what’s happening in Washington beyond the briefing room.

[Spivak is a public relations executive and a senior fellow at Wagner College’s Hugh L. Carey Institute for Government Reform]

Many presidents issue signing statements. If Trump’s statement is different from his predecessors’ in any way, it’s that he’s returning to a pattern set by President George W. Bush that had been set aside by President Barack Obama. Our research into signing statements from FDR forward indicates that they serve many purposes. Signing statements are used to:

• get the attention of the press and the public,
• shape views about legislative accomplishments and who deserves credit,
• influence the courts by offering the president’s interpretation and understanding of various provisions,
• instruct and guide bureaucrats, and
• highlight provisions the president feels are constitutionally problematic.

[Evans is assistant professor and director of undergraduate studies in the department of politics and international relations at Florida International University. Marshall is professor and assistant chair of the department of political science at Miami University.]

[Commentary] The Federal Communications Commission is launching initiatives that will shape the fate of America’s wireless industry. It started to examine competition in the market, and it will propose taking Depression-era utility regulations off mobile broadband networks while protecting an open internet. This is only the beginning. The FCC is acting on a rare opportunity to correct its recent mistakes and restore the Clinton-era light-touch regulatory framework that will drive economic growth and job creation. The FCC should begin by liberating wireless from the heavy-handed rules of a 1934 law called Title II, which was created when phones were held in two hands. This antiquated law imposes powerful economic regulations on the internet, chilling investment in broadband.

The FCC will propose to unshackle the net from this millstone of a law. This would restore the bipartisan light-touch policies that nurtured the burgeoning internet Americans enjoy today. The FCC can take a few other discrete steps. It would accelerate the mobile revolution if it streamlined rules that slow the construction of wireless infrastructure—and deprive consumers of the benefits of next-gen technologies. The agency should also update rules that dictate how much of a particular radio frequency a carrier can own in a market. America’s brilliant wireless engineers are inventing new ways to turn yesterday’s junk frequencies into tomorrow’s gold, rendering current regulations obsolete.

[Robert McDowell is a partner at Cooley LLP and chief public policy adviser to Mobile Future; he served as a FCC Commissioner 2006-13.]

What's the news that's getting buried by the news? A lot, actually. We're taking a look at one major story: media consolidation. This week, Kai Ryssdal and Molly Wood chat with Zeynep Tufekci, associate professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, about how one media deal will transform how you consume media. Marketplace's Adriene Hill helps us get smarter about how the television industry keeps making money despite digital competition. Plus, Annabelle Gurwitch, an actor and writer, shares stories about life in TV.

President Donald Trump asked FBI Director James Comey to shut down the federal investigation into Trump’s former national security adviser, Michael Flynn, in an Oval Office meeting in February 2017, according to a memo Comey wrote shortly after the meeting.

“I hope you can see your way clear to letting this go, to letting Flynn go,” President Trump told Comey, according to the memo. “He is a good guy. I hope you can let this go.” President Trump told Comey that Flynn had done nothing wrong, according to the memo. Comey did not say anything to Trump about curtailing the investigation, only replying: “I agree he is a good guy.”

In a statement, the White House denied the version of events in the memo.

The existence of Trump’s request is the clearest evidence that the President has tried to directly influence the Justice Department and FBI investigation into links between Trump’s associates and Russia. Comey wrote the memo detailing his conversation with the President immediately after the meeting, which took place the day after Flynn resigned, according to two people who read the memo. The memo was part of a paper trail Comey created documenting what he perceived as the President’s improper efforts to influence a continuing investigation. An FBI agent’s contemporaneous notes are widely held up in court as credible evidence of conversations.

Federal Communications Commission Chairman Ajit Pai has appointed members to serve on two Broadband Deployment Advisory Committee (BDAC) working groups, Competitive Access to Broadband Infrastructure and Removing State and Local Regulatory Barriers. The selection of members for the Streamlining Federal Siting working group is in progress, and final selections for this group will be announced at a later date.

Federal Communications Commission member Mignon Clyburn told a crowd of Title II fans that network neutrality is dead unless they make themselves heard, no matter what the vote on the upcoming Title II rollback is. Commissioner Clyburn is currently the lone Democrat under the new Republican Administration, so she cannot stop the reversal of Title II but could delay it if she does not show up for the May 18 meeting and denies the chairman the necessary quorum. That does not sound likely since she said she did not know what the FCC would be launching this week, but she would vote "in the opposite way" from the Republicans. She said net neutrality is dead if "we are silent," no matter how the vote goes. Devin Coldewey of TechCrunch asked whether public comments matter and pointed to identical pro-Title II comments that had been filed. Commissioner Clyburn said that the comments will not be officially part of the record until the FCC votes the rulemaking and said commenters should keep weighing in. She said that was the only way to defend net neutrality. Commissioner Clyburn said the FCC has the technical tools to deal with the duplicates or get rid of the comments where "there is a little something going on."

[Commentary] Yet before the partisan noise over network neutrality rises to the level of screeching decibels, it might be useful to provide some much-needed context. During the past two years, as the original Title II Order proceeding moved ahead, I wrote a series of pieces for Brookings’s TechTank that touch on issues that have as much relevance now as they did when first released. Published collectively here for the first time, I hope they will be considered in real time by policy advocates of all stripes, along with the FCC itself, as positions are formulated and final new internet service rules are adopted that will have long-term consequences.

With the prospect of the Sinclair-Tribune megamerger on the horizon, groups are urging the Federal Communications Commission to block the return of the UHF discount in order to slow broadcast industry consolidation. In a joint filing to the FCC, Free Press, United Church of Christ, Prometheus Radio Project, Media Mobilizing Project, Media Alliance, National Hispanic Media Coalition and Common Cause requested a stay of the reinstatement of the UHF discount, which would allow broadcasters to once again count UHF stations as 50 percent toward the national broadcast ownership cap. The groups argued that the technical logic for the UHF discount is no longer valid.

“It is arbitrary and capricious to adopt a provision that lacks any independent technical or policy support, and which contravenes the statutory limit on national television ownership,” the groups wrote in the filing. The groups also argued that news of the reinstatement is effectively triggering a new wave of broadcast industry mergers and acquisitions and allowing deals like Sinclair’s $3.9 billion bid for Tribune to move forward. The groups also said that a stay will benefit the public interest by maintaining more diversity in broadcasting. “Maintaining a diversity of voices goes to the heart of the Commission’s mission to promote competition and diversity, and all Americans will benefit from the grant of a stay,” the groups wrote.