By John Eggerton, Broadcasting & Cable Online, 5-16-17 Some leading Democratic members of the House Energy & Commerce Committee have called on the Republican leadership of the committee and Communications Subcommittee to look into the proposed $3.9-billion purchase of Tribune by Sinclair Broadcasting. That is unlikely to happen. A spokesperson for the majority had no [...]
By All Access Online, 5-10-17 Some 124 members of Congress have voiced their opposition to changes in the tax deductibility treatment of advertising as expenses. The legislators sent a letter to House Speaker Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) and Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.), with Reps. Kevin Yoder (R-Kan.) and Eliot Engel (D-N.Y.) as leading signatories, asking [...]
By John Eggerton, Broadcasting & Cable Online, 5-9-17 Net neutrality activist group Fight for the Future says it is "extremely skeptical" about the FCC's claims of a distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack Sunday night. The FCC said the attack happened at midnight, which would be just after comedian John Oliver's Last Week Tonight segment calling on viewers to flood the FCC [...]
By John Eggerton, Broadcasting & Cable Online, 5-9-17 Open MIC, which uses shareholder engagement to bring changes to media and tech companies, is trying to pressure social media sites to do more to combat fake news and hate speech. The group has released a report based on data and comments from researchers and technologists that it said [...]
By John Eggerton, Broadcasting & Cable Online, 5-2-17 Sen. Mike Lee (R-Utah) and some prominent Senate Republicans have introduced a bill, the Restoring Internet Freedom Act, that would nullify the FCC's 2015 Open Internet order and prevent the FCC from issuing similar rules in the future. If that sounds familiar, it's because it would mirror [...]
By John Eggerton, Broadcasting & Cable Online, 5-1-17 Washington was quick to weigh in on the latest news in the multi-front debate/battle over Open Internet rules – that was the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit decision not to review a three-judge panel of that court's decision that the FCC was within its authority to [...]
By Eliott C. McLaughlin, CNN Online, 4-27-17 Judging from the talk about the University of California, Berkeley lately, you'd think the campus was filled with hypersensitive snowflakes covering their ears to block out ideas they don't like. The school's latest free-speech controversy came this week when student groups bailed on a planned Thursday speech by right-wing commentator Ann [...]
By John Eggerton, Multichannel News Online, 4-26-17 FCC chair Ajit Pai has begun the process of reversing the classification of Internet service providers as Title II common carrier services and plans to vote on a Notice of Proposed Rulemaking to that effect at the May meeting. And while opponents have pledged to man and woman the [...]
By Paul Farhi, www.washingtonpost.com, 4-26-17 The United States' ranking for press freedom declined last year, driven in part by Donald Trump’s attacks on the news media, which also triggered a decline in other democracies, an international media organization said Wednesday. Reporters Without Borders, which compiles the World Press Freedom Index based on its assessment of the legal environment and [...]
By John Eggerton, Broadcasting & Cable Online, 4-24-17 FCC chairman Ajit Pai has pledged to roll back regulations he believes are wasteful or will cause unnecessary hardship, including rules that keep broadcasters from competing more aggressively in a world of media choice. Pai, a Republican FCC commissioner since 2012 who was named chairman by [...]