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Sen Kirsten Gillibrand (D-NY) took the floor of the Senate to call for a filibuster and voice concerns over how Judge Neil Gorsuch might handle First Amendment cases in light of President Trump’s calls to “open up” libel laws.

“Voting rights, workers’ rights, reproductive rights, even our First Amendment speech rights, which President Trump has threatened by saying he wants to ‘open up libel laws against the press’–if any of these cases make it to the Supreme Court, they will all be decided in part by the next Supreme Court justice,” Sen Gillibrand said. She added that the judge’s record “does not give me confidence that he will be a justice whose rulings would bolster those individual rights.”

President Donald Trump took to Twitter to defend former National Security Advisor Michael Flynn. The President tweeted, "Mike Flynn should ask for immunity in that this is a witch hunt (excuse for big election loss), by media & Dems, of historic proportion!"

It was reported that Flynn is willing to be interviewed by the Federal Bureau of Investigation and Congress regarding any possible ties between President Trump and Russia in exchange for immunity from prosecution. “General Flynn certainly has a story to tell, and he very much wants to tell it, should the circumstances permit,” Flynn’s lawyer Robert Kelner said in a statement.

The local PBS stations that would be hardest hit by President Trump’s proposed budget cuts are in states that voted for Trump. Public television receives about 15 percent of its funding from federal sources, according to PBS. But in rural parts of the country — most of which voted overwhelmingly for Trump — that federal funding represents a much larger portion of the budget. Federal taxes provide up to 50 percent of the money for some stations. Federal tax dollars for public TV are administered through the private Corporation for Public Broadcasting, which has a $445 million annual budget.

Among the PBS member stations that get roughly half their budgets from the CPB is KYUK in Bethel (AK). Bill Legere, the general manager of KTOO — a joint radio and TV station which serves the approximately 33,000 residents of Juneau (AK) and surrounding villages — said his station would be “devastated” by the proposed cuts. “If there was anything left of the service we provide, there would be very little local content,” Legere said. “Very little content that’s responsive to Alaskan interests and needs. If we could even stay in business.” Alaska voted overwhelmingly for Trump. But Legere said most residents would be “shocked to think about not having this service available here.” In fact, a study commissioned by PBS last year found that 70 percent of Trump voters would oppose cuts to public broadcasting.

[Commentary] Today, the biggest threat to artistic freedom in the United States comes not from the heavy hand of government censorship, but instead from individuals, unhappy with the way they are portrayed — or believe they are being portrayed– on the big and small screen. They file lawsuits against studios, writers, and directors — seeking large sums of money and even court orders barring distribution of a motion picture or television program. Though rarely successful, these lawsuits threaten to chill free speech, by discouraging creators from tackling sensitive real-life subjects and diverting energy and resources from the creative process.

To combat such suits, lawmakers in about 30 states, including California, have enacted laws that give those targeted by lawsuits attacking free speech an effective way to fight back. These laws, known as “anti-SLAPP statutes” (SLAPP = “strategic lawsuit against public participation”), give those sued for exercise of their First Amendment rights on public issues a quiver full of legal arrows that help get these meritless lawsuits dismissed relatively quickly and cheaply. The use of anti-SLAPP statues by media companies is not “dirty” — and it’s not a “secret.” Anti-SLAPP statutes are vital to protecting the First Amendment rights of writers, directors, and the studios that employ them. We at the Motion Picture Association of America are proud of our long history of fighting for filmmakers’ free speech rights. We will continue advocating for strong anti-SLAPP laws that ensure those rights protect us all.

[Ben Sheffner is Vice President, Legal Affairs at the Motion Picture Association of America, Inc.]

Here are five things to know about new Federal Communications Commission Chairman Ajit Pai.
1. He was an Obama appointee
2. He’s a longtime opponent of net neutrality
3. He isn’t afraid to explicitly criticize his predecessor, Tom Wheeler
4. He’s a former Verizon lawyer
5. He’s from Kansas

Steve Bannon’s demand that the media “keep its mouth shut” reflects the new Trump administration’s weakness and not its strength.

“If Bannon didn’t care, then he would ignore all of it,” said Al Tompkins, Poynter Institute’s senior faculty for broadcasting and online. “The opposite of love is not hate — it’s apathy. It matters and they know that this press coverage is killing their credibility,” Tompkins said. “Even their own supporters have to be raising questions.”

“This isn’t the first time the administration has attacked the media,” said Bill Wheatley, former NBC News executive and adjunct professor at the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism. “I remember when Spiro Agnew called us ‘nattering nabobs of negativism.’ We were under attack during the Nixon administration. We just need to do our jobs. That’s what it’s all about.”

Tompkins added, “I’m not worried. I believe there has not been a time in my life when journalists have mattered more, when things have moved as fast as they’re moving now.” He continued: “The role of journalism is essential because the role of the government right now is so unclear. You have a massive exodus at the State Department, a pending trade war with Mexico and the pending dismantling of a very large health insurance system and it’s all happening too fast for regular citizens to make sense of it, so we need journalists now more than ever.”

AT&T CEO Randall Stephenson and CFO John Stephens shed light on the company’s fourth-quarter finances and future outlook as the world’s largest telecom company continues its evolution into a media empire. One thing they aren’t overly concerned with: the future of “zero rating,” which has helped its new streaming service DirecTV Now accumulate more than 200,000 subscribers in less than two months of operation.

AT&T uses zero rating to not charge its wireless customers for data they use while streaming DirecTV Now, the over-the-top service the company launched in November that opened with a promotional offer of more than 100 channels for $35 a month. The Federal Communications Commission sent a letter to AT&T in December expressing competitive concern about zero rating, but with a new regime led by network neutrality opponent Ajit Pai — installed by President Donald Trump — Stephenson isn’t worried about its longer-term prospects. “We actually were quite confident that zero rating as we were implementing was fine under a Pai chairmanship,” Stephenson said, remarking that AT&T was “going hard” when it was putting together that capability. “You should expect us to continue that, and continue to push aggressively on this.”

This weekend, a telephone company bought one of Hollywood’s most treasured studios, the home of “Harry Potter” and “The Sopranos” and “The Lord of the Rings” and “Game of Thrones.” It’s a real wakeup call, when a phone company came for Hollywood. And it makes you wonder if content is king after all. And if it is — for how long? It’s all, apparently, about mobile, and being able to move content at lightning speed on those little screens that have become our constant obsession.

In many ways, by agreeing to sell Time Warner, Time Warner CEO Jeff Bewkes has admitted that a legacy content company cannot keep up with the pace of innovation demanded in an age of competition by Netflix and Amazon. Though those companies are relatively new to creating original content, their ability to drive decisions based on data is something with which Time Warner cannot compete on its own. But as part of AT&T, it probably can. Or possibly. (It’s unclear if NBCU uses the data Comcast could likely provide to drive its own content decisions.) For so many of us who’ve seen Hollywood as the crown jewel in the creation of popular culture, getting bought by a phone company feels like the tail wagging the dog.

Newspapers with a history of endorsing Republican presidential candidates are losing subscribers and even receiving death threats after endorsing Hillary Clinton over Donald Trump. The Arizona Republic’s editorial board has received death threats since publishing its Clinton endorsement earlier in the week of Sept 26. It was the first time the paper endorsed a Democrat in a general election since it launched in 1890.

Meanwhile, Cincinnati Enquirer editor Peter Bhatia said his paper has lost “hundreds” of subscriptions since its editorial board broke a nearly century-long habit of backing the Republican in the presidential contest. “There has been a substantial amount of blowback, that’s for sure,” Bhatia told TheWrap. “The people who are reacting are predominantly unhappy with the endorsement.” The Enquirer’s Clinton endorsement has racked up nearly 1,000 comments and Bhatia has personally responded to at least 150 e-mails. He said the editorial board expected a reaction but never imagined how venomous some of the feedback has been.

A new study says broadcasters treat women better overall than cable or streaming networks do. Forty-one percent of major characters on broadcast shows were female during the 2015-16 TV season, compared with just 39 percent on streaming platforms and 28 percent on cable, according to a study by San Diego State professor Martha M. Lauzen.

Moreover, broadcasters offered more racially diverse programming, with black females comprising 17 percent of all characters – a historic high. Five percent of the female characters on broadcast networks were Latina; only 3 percent of those on cable and streaming outlets were. But the report, “Boxed In 2015-16: Women On Screen and Behind the Scenes in Television,” made it clear there is plenty of room for improvement everywhere when it comes to gender parity, both in front of and behind the camera.