Journalism

Federal Communications Commissioner Olivia Trusty delivered remarks at the Media Institute's Free Speech America Gala. She spoke about free speech, broadcasting, and ensuring US leadership in communications innovation. "First, we must maintain a regulatory environment that encourages it," she said. "That means eliminating unnecessary legal barriers, streamlining outdated rules, and modernizing permitting to support investment and deployment. Second, we must use federal resources wisely. Spectrum must be put to its highest and best use.

A growing share of Americans are using artificial intelligence chatbots like ChatGPT. But chatbots have not become a regular source of news for most Americans. About one-in-ten U.S. adults say they get news often (2 percent) or sometimes (7 percent) from AI chatbots like ChatGPT or Gemini. An additional 16 percent do so rarely, according to a recent Pew Research Center survey. Most Americans (75 percent) say they never get news this way.

Federal Communications Commission Chairman Brendan Carr was blasted as a “censorship czar” by protesters, who disturbed the FCC’s open meeting before being escorted out by security. The open meeting was the FCC’s first one since the multi-day suspension of Jimmy Kimmel from his ABC late night show—which came about after Chairman Carr publicly

Local U.S. television news provides citizens with crucial local information, particularly during periods of heightened political, social, or environmental salience. Yet local television news is under increased pressure to consolidate, which may serve to de-localize local news reporting by duplicating news content delivery across local broadcast stations. We employed automated text reuse methods to measure the extent to which local broadcast station pairs duplicated (exact text reuse) each other’s news content. Key findings include:

The recent blowup over Jimmy Kimmel is driven by a lot of powerful currents in American life—grief, politics, business, freedom of speech.

President Donald Trump filed a defamation lawsuit against the New York Times and several of its reporters, accusing the newspaper of libeling him in several articles in the lead-up to last year’s presidential election. In a Truth Social post, President Trump described the 174-year-old newspaper as “one of the worst and most degenerate newspapers in the History of our Country.” “The New York Times has been allowed to freely lie, smear, and defame me for far too long, and that stops, NOW!” he wrote

The Freedom of the Press Foundation has filed a disciplinary complaint letter against Brendan Carr, accusing the Federal Communications Commission chair of violating legal ethics rules in what the nonprofit watchdog describes as a politically motivated campaign to pressure news organizations and benefit President Trump.

The Federal Communications Commission approved Skydance’s $8 billion acquisition of Paramount Global and its subsidiaries, including the ultimate parent company of the CBS network of owned and operated broadcast television stations, by granting a series of applications that transfer FCC licenses and authorizations.

In declaring war on The Wall Street Journal over its coverage of his yearslong friendship with the convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein, President Trump tapped his supporters’ distrust of his favorite foe—the news media—in an effort to put down a mutiny within his base. It was a familiar move that might have been

The gutting of federal funding for public broadcasters is expected to cause hundreds of local station groups to significantly scale back or shutter across the country, of