Benton RSS Feed

A year ago, the White House launched We the People, a new platform that allows anyone to create or sign petitions asking the Obama Administration to take action on a range of issues. In just one year's time, the platform has generated 3.4 million signatures by 2.8 million users. And what's even more exciting is that participation is growing across the board — with more users and signatures every month.

We really couldn't anticipate just how popular We the People would be, especially at the beginning. In the first week, nearly 8,000 petitions had been created, racking up more than 600,000 signatures by 375,000 users. Also, thirty petitions reached our original threshold of 5,000 signatures. This was a good problem to have, but we knew that this many petitions would challenge our ability to offer timely and meaningful responses to petitions in the long term. So we raised signature threshold to receive a response to 25,000. From the beginning we’ve said that if a petition gathers enough online signatures, policy officials here at the White House and across the Administration will review it and issue an official response. In this first year we’ve had 116 petitions cross the threshold and 103 have already received a response. And, despite the fact that only a small percentage of the over 50,000 petitions have crossed the signature threshold, you’d probably be surprised to hear that 1.1 million people or 39% of users have received a response. It’s also worth noting that starting on May 15, 2012 we began surveying signers who received a response. Since then, we've found that 78% of survey responders said that even if they don’t agree with the Administration’s response, it was still helpful to hear our position on the issue, 54% of responders learned something new, and a full 88% would consider creating or signing another petition on We the People.

Casino mogul Sheldon Adelson grabbed the spotlight in the US earlier this year for making multi-million dollar campaign contributions to Republican presidential candidates on the bet that their policies would better jibe with those of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu than with President Obama's. In Israel, Adelson is better known as the force behind the five-year-old free newspaper, "Yisrael Hayom" (Israel Today), which is seen by some as the Israeli print equivalent of Fox News.

Touting Israeli patriotism, it is among the most widely read newspapers in the country and has a reputation for its fiercely loyal coverage of Netanyahu – and now Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney. Adelson rejects accusations of bias, insisting in a previous interview that his paper is a "fair and balanced" alternative to other newspapers more critical of the government and that he is breaking rival newspaper Yediot Ahranot's monopoly on the market. Many Israelis nonetheless see the paper as a political vehicle to support the prime minster, and now, American Republican politicians. And with other newspapers floundering financially while Adelson puts his substantial wealth behind Yisrael Hayom, some worry that he is squeezing other political ideologies out of the market.

This Report summarizes the various policy options open to governments and policy-makers to roll out the deployment of broadband networks and services and to position their country for future competitiveness in the growing digital economy.

Broadband networks and services are more than simple infrastructure – they represent a set of transformative technologies that promise to change the way we communicate, work, play and do business. It is essential that every country takes broadband policy into account to shape its future social and economic development and prosperity, emphasizing both the supply and demand sides of the market. Further, it is crucial to adequately evaluate the potential alternatives to be implemented in order to encourage private sector investment. A “one size fits all” policy to broadband roll-out could have negative implications for the ICT market. Finally, a detailed cost-benefit approach should be adopted when evaluating different public policies and regulatory options to promote the growth and development of broadband in different countries around the world.

News Corporation is one of the world’s largest media companies. Under its Global Energy Initiative, the company has publicly committed to engaging its audiences on sustainability issues and the company publicly touts climate change initiatives among its successes. Despite News Corp.’s public commitment to environmental sustainability, a snapshot analysis by the Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS) finds that recent portrayals of climate science on Fox News Channel and in the Wall Street Journal’s opinion section are overwhelmingly misleading.

UCS’s analysis finds that:

• Over a recent six-month period, 93 percent of Fox News Channel’s representations of climate science were misleading (37 out of 40 instances).
• Similarly, over the past year, 81 percent of the representations of climate science in the Wall Street Journal’s opinion section were misleading (39 out of 48 instances).