Thursday, November 24, 2016

Filling the Swamp: Trump's Plan to Turn Over the FCC to Telecom Industry Insiders

One of Donald Trump's top tech policy advisers has a plan: Do away with the main agency that protects the rights of internet users and media consumers in America.

You heard that right. Mark Jamison, who Trump chose to help oversee the tech-policy transition team, thinks that getting rid of the Federal Communications Commission would be a good thing for this country.

"Most of the original motivations for having an FCC have gone away," Jamison wrote last month, claiming that a heavily consolidated media marketplace would discipline itself to benefit ordinary people.

He's dead wrong.

Wednesday, November 09, 2016

Trump's Rise, The Media's Fall and the Way Forward

If we've learned anything from this, it's that traditional media failed at their job to inform people about what was really at stake in this election. Instead we were treated to a horserace-cum-reality-TV-show where pollsters judged winners and losers in hourly increments as know-nothing pundits shouted over one another for a moment in the spotlight.

All the while, old media executives like Jeff Zucker and Les Moonves reveled in all things Trump, serving up unblinking wall-to-wall coverage of this profoundly despicable con artist to juice ratings and drive revenues. So much for "comforting the afflicted and afflicting the comfortable." The show must go on.