trump – Techdirt (original) (raw)

Dish Tries To Distract Everyone From Doomed 5G Network By Proposing Pointless Merger With Echostar

from the hey,-look-behind-you! dept

We just got done noting how Dish Network’s long-hyped 5G wireless network is likely doomed. While they’re technically building a “wireless network,” the network’s coverage, phone selection, and overall quality has proven laughable so far, and there have been growing worries that Dish is running out of cash.

Hoping to distract the press and regulators from this fact, Dish last week leaked word that they were considering a merger with satellite provider Echostar (spun out from Dish back in 2008).

Like so many U.S. megadeals the merger is a pointless one. Dish Network is saddled with debt, on the regulatory hook for a 5G network they’ll probably never finish, and is consistently bleeding not only traditional satellite TV subscribers, but the streaming video and wireless users its pivot was supposed to have been luring in by the bucketful.

Duct-taping Echostar to the side of this mess would be a giant distraction, likely result in pointless layoffs, and, outside of the stock bump and tax breaks, serves no technical function. And it generally smells like a desperation move from Dish CEO Charlie Ergen, who has a general reputation as an annoyingly and sometimes pointlessly stubborn negotiator and a bit of a cheapskate:

Ergen is as cautious and calculating in dealmaking as he was during his days as a professional gambler, when he was kicked out of a Lake Tahoe casino for counting cards. The sticky governance issues mean he would have to pay top dollar to get EchoStar, and he’s not known for that.

You might recall the Dish network was the Trump-era “fix” for the competitive erosion caused by the Sprint and T-Mobile merger. We noted back in 2019 that the whole thing was a doomed mess custom built by Trump-era “antitrust enforcers” as a flimsy way to justify additional industry consolidation.

Now the check’s coming due. While Dish has technically met the FCC’s obligation to craft a wireless network reaching 70% of the population (concentrated in a handful of major cities), the network reach, quality, and phone selection has generally been laughed at in terms of Dish being a valid player in the wireless space.

And it gets harder for Dish now. The next FCC-set benchmark is to reach 75 percent of the U.S. population by 2025, but that involves pushing into a lot more higher deployment cost rural and suburban markets. That’s hard to do when you’re running out of money and nobody takes your wireless play seriously (outside of a handful of telecom trade magazines whose ads and event funding rely on a cozy relationship with industry).

I still suspect this all ends with Ergen selling his vast troves of spectrum holdings and half-completed network to somebody like Verizon, and the FCC doling out a tiny wrist slap (if that) for Dish missing deployment obligations. And the Trump-era regulators that birthed this turd of a plan pretending the whole thing never happened.

The collapse will result in a bunch of layoffs and consumer annoyance. But everybody high up in the chain will have gotten what they wanted, ensuring nobody learns anything. Ergen gets a big load of cash from spectrum holdings that appreciated as feckless U.S. regulators were strung along for years. AT&T, Verizon, and Sprint see less competition. And Trump-era officials got the pointless consolidation they craved.

Filed Under: 5g, consolidation, fcc, megamergers, merger, regulators, telecom, trump, wireless
Companies: dish, echostar

NY AG Doles Out Wrist Slap Fine To Companies That Helped Telecom Giants Use Fake And Dead People To Lie About Net Neutrality

from the fake-plastic-trees dept

Fri, May 12th 2023 05:31am - Karl Bode

You might recall how when U.S. telecom giants lobbied the Trump FCC to kill net neutrality, they hired a bunch of PR firms to flood the FCC with fake comments from a bunch of fake and dead people. The goal: create the illusion of support for shitty, unpopular policies. It’s a pretty popular tactic by corporations and lobbying firms looking to influence the government and/or create the illusion of consensus.

In 2021, New York Attorney General Leticia James unveiled a report (also see accompanying statement) proving what most people already knew: the broadband industry was behind the use of fake and dead people to generate bogus support for the FCC’s controversial 2017 repeal of net neutrality. The report didn’t name any specific broadband companies and only singled out the proxy firms they used.

Several years later, and James’ office has finally managed to dole out a wrist slap fine ($615,000) for the three PR and policy firms used by the broadband industry: LCX Digital Media, Lead ID, LLC., and Ifficient Inc. All three “lead generation” companies also worked for other companies looking to influence policies at agencies like the EPA. And not for the betterment of competent policymaking or mankind.

Once again, none of the telecom monopolies that actually hired the firms (Comcast and AT&T are often suspected to be the most active in these kinds of campaigns) are even named in the announcement, despite James likely knowing full well who paid for these “services.” In a statement, James tries to pretend that such a half-assed penalty will actually change anything:

“No one should have their identity co-opted by manipulative companies and used to falsely promote a private agenda,” said New York Attorney General Letitia James in an announcement Wednesday.

Again, these fake comment efforts are glorified propaganda campaigns by deep-pocketed corporations designed to provide flimsy cover for corrupt and captured regulators to make policy decisions that are opposed by a majority of Americans (the repeal of net neutrality saw widespread, bipartisan opposition).

One such effort plagued a proceeding at the Labor Department, where numerous people who either don’t exist or don’t recall ever sending messages breathlessly opposed agency efforts to prevent conflicts of interest in retirement advice. The same problem plagued the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau when it proposed a rule trying to rein in some of the nastier habits of the payday lending industry.

Nobody in government or policy circles ever seems to show much interest in getting to the bottom of this problem. The public rarely can be bothered to care either (kudos to you if you made it this far down this article). And in the rare instance where somebody does act (like the NY AG), the fines are a tiny pittance in relation to whatever policy proposal the companies were attempting to game out.

Now pause for a moment and consider how “AI” tech like ChatGPT will make these kinds of lobbying influence and propaganda campaigns cheaper and easier than ever just as we face a well-funded, deeply coordinated campaign to finally and fully defang the regulatory state once and for all.

Filed Under: broadband, chevron deference, consumer rights, fake comments, fcc, letitia james, net neutrality, propaganda, regulators, trump
Companies: ifficient, lcx digital media, lead id

New Report Shows How 2016 ‘DNC Hacked Itself’ Story Was Fabricated Garbage And The Nation Ran With It Anyway

from the propaganda-bonanza dept

Thu, Feb 9th 2023 05:28am - Karl Bode

Back in 2015, you might recall how the Russian Government was caught hacking into the DNC. It wasn’t particularly subtle; a Russian intelligence officer pretending to be a Romanian hacker made the dumb mistake of forgetting to turn on his VPN, revealing his Russian intelligence agency IP address to the world. The data he obtained concerning ongoing squabbling within the DNC was later leaked to the press to influence the 2016 election, and the rest is well documented history.

In the wake of the attack, a baseless rumor began to mysteriously make the rounds, suggesting that the DNC had, for some reason, hacked itself. The claim popped up everywhere, but its most notable traction came courtesy of an article over at The Nation, which took the claim and ran with it without doing even the most basic of fact checking. The claim then popped up all over the Internet, from Bloomberg opinion columns and Breitbart, to out of Donald Trump’s own mouth.

The problem: it was all absolute, unrefined, 100% bullshit.

What actually happened? Seven years after the fact, and journalist Duncan Campbell has finally published a story examining The Nation’s odd editorial history of stifling criticism of Russia internally. It also rips apart the Nation’s article, written by Patrick Lawrence, who, Campbell claims, repeated baseless claims made by pro-Trump trolls and hackers pretending to be intelligence analysts:

Lawrence invented situations and people, got facts wrong, and made far-reaching claims without substantiation. Information that Lawrence described as “hard evidence” had, in reality, been manufactured by members of a Trump-supporting website, Disobedient Media, founded in 2017 by William Craddick, a former law student who claimed to have started the “Pizzagate” conspiracy theory. The primary source in Lawrence’s story, cited eighteen times, was an anonymous figure, a supposed forensic expert known as “Forensicator.” That name was created by Disobedient Media in consultation with Tim Leonard, a British hacker, as an identity through which to present the “Forensicator report,” the document purporting to substantiate the “inside job” theory.

At the time, we pointed out how one of the key claims, that the speed at which the files had been transferred were too fast to have been done remotely over broadband, were absolute bullshit any actual intelligence expert or fact checker would have noticed. That resulted in an anti-Techdirt temper tantrum by the fake news troll in question over at his since-dismantled website.

Another cornerstone of The Nation’s story, the claim that a group of intelligence professionals like William Binney (dubbed the “VIPS”) had reviewed “Forensicator’s” evidence and corroborated its claims, also proved to be bullshit. Later on, Binney would admit to Campbell the entire thing was a “fabrication”:

When I met with Binney the next month, however, he told me that, when the Lawrence piece was published, the VIPS had not actually checked the evidence or reasoning in the Forensicator report. When Binney eventually looked into one of its key claims—that the stolen data could be proven to have been copied directly at a computer on the east coast—he changed his mind. There was “no evidence to prove where the copy was done”, he told me. The data “Forensicator” had given to VIPS had been “manipulated”, Binney said, and was “a fabrication”.

At that point, the pile on was afoot, and numerous outlets had security experts who also noted that The Nation story was bullshit. Instead of pulling the story, Campbell states that after significant pressure, The Nation co-owner and former editor Katrina vanden Heuvel finally affixed a “we were just asking questions” pre-amble to the head of piece, which was only quietly pulled offline last year (copy here).

Both vanden Huevel and new Nation editorial boss D.D. Guttenplan downplay the monumental fuck up in conversations with Campbell, at one point urging him to “get a life”:

When I ask Guttenplan about the controversy surrounding the Lawrence piece, he replies, “Water has gone under the bridge. I am comfortable.” He adds, “The Nation is a beacon for progressive ideas, democratic politics, women’s rights, racial and economic justice, and open debate between liberals and radicals.” Any damage done to the reputation of the magazine is minor, he argues, compared to all of the good it has done. What about the objections of his staff? “I don’t see the point of obsessing about it,” Guttenplan concludes. “Get a life!”

In 2018, a DOJ indictment against nearly a dozen Russian hackers would lay out in detail how Russian intelligence compromised the DNC, stole data, then carefully leaked that data to outlets like The Intercept to divide Democrats and improve Trump’s chance of winning the 2016 election (the author of said piece has since enjoyed a lucrative career spreading authoritarian apologia).

Fast forward seven years later, and there’s no shortage of supposed progressive journalists (some regulars at the Nation) with a strange affection for parroting Russian propaganda, and downplaying every and any instance of Russian authoritarian aggression, whether it’s denying the Syrian government’s use of chemical weapons on civilians, denying the idea that a Russian-government linked group shot down a civilian airliner over Ukraine, or pretending that Ukraine is to blame for the war.

Campbell notes that Lawrence was allowed to write fifteen more features for The Nation in the year after the story was published, and there’s been no shortage of similar stories at the outlet written since by other authors with a tendency to downplay Russian authoritarianism. Some even referencing the “DNC hacked itself” theory as established fact.

Originally slated to appear in 2018, Campbell claims that his story was killed by Columbia Journalism Review (CJR) and then new editor Kyle Pope. Pope this week denied the story was killed, claiming it wasn’t run because it was late. Campbell has since written a second story outlining his experiences with CJR killing his story, claiming CJR had previously undisclosed business relationships with The Nation they didn’t want to jeopardize, and the story was “slow-walked to dismissal” after a year-long editing process.

Ultimately the whole dumb thing remains a cautionary tale of propaganda’s effective reach and U.S. journalism’s ongoing failure to counter or even recognize it, whether it’s coming from the U.S. or Russian government or a basement-dwelling troll half a world away. To this day, the lie that the DNC hacked itself remains a stone-cold fact in the brains of many right wingers and conspiracy theorists, and The Nation still, the better part of a decade later, hasn’t meaningfully owned the “error” heard ’round the world.

Filed Under: disinformation, dnc, dnc hacked itself, duncan campbell, guccifer 2.0, hacking, misinformation, privacy, propaganda, russian intelligence, security, trump
Companies: the nation

GOP Belatedly Realizes Its Embrace Of Propaganda And Conspiracy Results In Bizarre And Unpopular Candidates

from the head-full-of-pudding-and-hate dept

Wed, Feb 1st 2023 05:20am - Karl Bode

Frustrated by factual reality, science, and an independent press, the GOP and its wealthy backers have spent the better part of forty years building an alternative reality propaganda machine across AM radio, local broadcasting (with the help of Sinclair Broadcasting), fake “pink slime” local newspapers, cable news (OANN, Newsmax, Fox), and now the Internet.

While this propaganda machine has adequately insulated the modern Trump and Desantis GOP from the pesky menace of factual reality, there have been some downsides. The GOP’s belief that it no longer has to participate in public debates, for example, has resulted in a crop of insular, unpopular, and strange candidates who don’t have broader appeal — because they’re not participating in factual reality.

Amusingly, at least some Republican advisors appear to have realized this, and are urging the party to spend more time participating in real debates hosted by actual journalists. Or, at least, having debates where actual journalists are in attendance for some window dressing:

A Republican familiar with the conversations said the RNC is considering pairing mainstream outlets with conservative outlets as co-moderators, a regular feature of 2016 debates as well, to address member concerns about bias. The RNC’s proposal request includes a section for networks to fill out that dives into whether they’d be open to partnerships.

But part of the goal, the person said, would be to ensure candidates don’t get “softball questions that aren’t of substance” and that they are forced to “talk about policy and give answers.” The RNC meeting notably comes after a midterms in which a number of candidates popular in conservative media circles struggled to connect with independent voters in the general election.

Semafor, like most mainstream U.S. political outlets, can’t candidly acknowledge that Republicans built a hugely influential and successful propaganda machine, lest it upset sources, advertisers, or event sponsors. So their story kind of amusingly tap dances around the fact that a lot of the party’s problems in the midterms stemmed from out of touch delusion built on the back of a massively successful party propaganda machine.

It’s not clear that the party of Trump and Desantis, whose entire political careers involve agitating and dividing Americans using a rotating platter of unhinged conspiracy, bigotry, and outrage over everything from more energy efficient game consoles to inclusive candy branding, will ever actually listen to the handful of advisors warning about the impact of this isolation. In part because outrage and division is genuinely the only semi-meaningful policies they have.

GOP propaganda exploits a parade of U.S. policy failures across media (consolidation, death of local news), education (poor to no media savviness training), journalism (failure to develop independent funding models for an independent press), and the Internet (centralized social media platforms susceptible to the whims of unhinged billionaires).

But at some point, you’d imagine that the discourse and culture will develop policy fixes for some of these issues, and an immune response to candidates whose entire platform relies on unhinged conspiracies, bottomless outrage over minutiae, and vicious bigotry.

The GOP is hopeful that gerrymandering and propaganda will shield it from both factual and electoral reality for decades to come. And so far, that’s proven to be a solid bet, keeping a party with few substantive policies neck and neck in major races. The problem, again, is that candidates with heads full of pudding, hatred, and conspiracy theories aren’t going to appeal to the public; especially younger Americans who increasingly realize the modern Trump GOP is routinely and violently full of shit.

Filed Under: debates, desantis, disinformation, flood the zone with shit, gop, media, media consolidation, media reform, politics, propaganda, trump

Wyoming ‘Bans’ Electric Cars In Dumb Performative Oil Industry Ass Kissing

from the this-is-why-we-can't-have-nice-things dept

Thu, Jan 19th 2023 01:29pm - Karl Bode

While some states work on how best to phase out traditional gas cars to help mitigate the climate’s steady collapse, Wyoming is busy showcasing how far its head is lodged up the ass of the oil and gas industry.

Last week Wyoming’s GOP-controlled state legislature passed Senate Joint Resolution 4, which calls for a phaseout of new electric vehicle sales by 2035:

The bill states that “oil and gas production has long been one of Wyoming’s proud and valued industries” and has generated “countless jobs” and “contributed revenues” to the state. It goes on to say that Wyoming’s “vast stretches of highway, coupled with a lack of electric vehicle charging infrastructure” would make “widespread use of electric vehicles impracticable.”

This being 2023 Republicans, the resolution doesn’t actually fucking do anything beyond trolling electric vehicle supporters and advertising these politicians’ mindless fealty to energy interests. It’s something Wyoming State Senator Senator Brian Boner is quite proud of as he attempts to make something resembling a point of some kind:

“I’m interested in making sure that the solutions that some folks want to the so-called climate crisis are actually practical in real life,” GOP co-sponsor Sen. Brian Boner said, according to Cowboy State Daily. “I just don’t appreciate when other states try to force technology that isn’t ready.”

Boner even acknowledged the resolution’s trolling nature. “One might even say tongue-in-cheek,” Boner said of the resolution, adding, “But obviously it’s a very serious issue that deserves some public discussion.”

Yes, the steady climate catastrophe, whose violent and fatal impact is being seen every day on the news, requires the kind of serious public discussion one only finds through… meaningless political performances whose only function is to annoy others and obstruct progress.

North Carolina engaged in a similar performance lately when it futilely proposed a bill demanding all cities in the state destroy all electric vehicle charging stations state wide. The bill also demanded that any business that offers free charging itemize the cost said chargers impose on patrons, in a weird, clumsy bid to potentially shame them away from embracing electric vehicles.

All told it’s the kind of nonsensical, trolling, corrupt, childish gibberish the modern GOP has become synonymous with. It’s a party that has no policy solutions, but does provide endless zero-calorie drivel that makes finding real solutions to real problems significantly more difficult.

Filed Under: bans, charging stations, electric vehicle, gop, phaseout, senate joint resolution 4, trump, wyoming

NY Times Aptly Illustrates How The AT&T Time Warner Merger Was An Even Bigger Mess Than You Probably Realized

from the nobody-wins,-everybody-loses dept

Mon, Nov 28th 2022 12:06pm - Karl Bode

The AT&T Time Warner and DirecTV mergers were a monumental, historical disaster. AT&T spent $200 billion (including debt) to acquire both companies thinking it would dominate the video and internet ad space. Instead, the company lost 9 million subscribers in nine years, fired 50,000 employees, closed numerous popular brands (including Mad Magazine), and basically stumbled around incompetently for several years before recently spinning off the entire mess for a song.

The New York Times recently published the kind of merger post mortem the media usually can’t be bothered to do. The outlet spoke to dozens of individuals at the companies who detail how AT&T leadership was completely out of its depth, refused to take any advice, and blinded by the kind of hubris developed over a generation of being a government-pampered telecom monopoly.

While the Trump DOJ ultimately sued to stop the deal, it was never actually due to antitrust concerns. It was because a petulant President was mad at CNN for critical media coverage. And it was also because Time Warner repeatedly refused to sell itself to Fox boss Rupert Murdoch, who likely hoped to either kill the deal or nab some divested chunks of the acquired assets.

But the NYT tells an interesting tale of a meeting in which not only did Trump originally praise CNN, but AT&T promised it would fire CNN boss Jeff Zucker if the administration approved the deal:

Mr. Trump kept up his Twitter diatribe against CNN and Mr. Zucker. But on June 22, Mr. Stephenson visited the White House along with other chief executives, and Mr. Trump was surprisingly effusive in his praise for the AT&T chairman, saying publicly that he had done “really a top job.”

Mr. Stephenson’s warm presidential reception was shortly followed by a visit to Time Warner by Larry Solomon, the head of corporate communications for AT&T. Mr. Solomon told Mr. Ginsberg that he was there to give him a “heads up” that “we’re going to fire Jeff Zucker,” Mr. Ginsberg recalled.

AT&T denies that ever happened. Then again, it also tries to claim it didn’t take a total bath on the deal. The New York Times, meanwhile, seems to downplay the persistent indications that the Trump DOJ’s sudden and completely uncharacteristic interest in antitrust issues was not just a lawsuit driven by Trump’s petty anger at CNN, but Rupert Murdoch’s interest in acquiring or at least harming a competitor.

The Trump DOJ ultimately lost the lawsuit due to its sloppy failure to truly illustrate the consolidative harms of the deal (since again, they didn’t actually care about that aspect of it). Calls by ex-DOJ officials for an investigation into the DOJ abusing its power (since again, the lawsuit was mostly about Trump’s ego and helping Rupert Murdoch) went nowhere, as such things tend to do in the U.S.

AT&T’s attempt to pivot from stodgy old telco to modern video advertising juggernaut completely collapsed anyway under the weight of its ego and incompetence, forcing the company to spin off DirecTV and Time Warner in various deals that continue to go badly, just in new incarnations with new names (Time Warner Disney is itself a dumpster fire for the ages).

Don’t feel too badly for AT&T though. Something the NYT doesn’t really mention is how the Trump era in general remained an all time great one for AT&T, which not only got a $42 billion Trump tax cut for doing nothing, it received numerous regulatory favors from the Trump FCC from the gutting of net neutrality and media consolidation rules to the effective lobotomization of the FCC’s consumer protection authority.

The Times does mention how most of the AT&T executives who bungled the disastrous deal received massive cash payouts as “punishment.” But the Times downplays how the megadeal eliminated jobs for more than 50,000 (and counting) employees, and resulted in a generally shittier product for consumers (CNN under Discovery leadership is in the midst of a disastrous bid to shift its coverage from bland and feckless centrism to more right wing authoritarian appeasement and it’s… not going great).

The Times also doesn’t really touch on the fact that mindless consolidation like this happens constantly. Or that U.S. antitrust enforcement is comically broken. Or that the press (including the Times) can routinely be found un-skeptically parroting supposed synergies of such deals pre-merger, helping create the problems they report on. At least we got a post-mortem, which is more than most major press outlets can be bothered to do in a country that treats disastrous, pointless mergers like a national pastime.

Filed Under: antitrust, antitrust reform, competition, consolidation, doj, media, mergers, telecom, trump
Companies: at&t, directv, time warner

Ted Cruz, Mike Lee Join Dumb, Baseless GOP Quest To Pretend OAN Was Unfairly Censored

from the conspiratorial-gibberish dept

Fri, Mar 25th 2022 05:44am - Karl Bode

So we’ve already noted how OAN was booted off of the DirecTV lineup, severing a massive mainstream distribution avenue for the conspiracy and fantasy channel. DirecTV, recently spun off by AT&T, made the decision because the channel, despite all the attention, really wasn’t being watched very much.

Angry that a major source of GOP propaganda was no longer being pumped into millions of homes, both OAN and the GOP have been engaged in a silly quest to try and pretend that the decision was somehow unfair, censorial, or the result of partisan shenanigans.

First OAN had its anchors attack a Black AT&T board member and former Democratic FCC official, in a bizarre attempt to make it seem like DirecTV’s decision was politically and racially motivated. Then it filed suit against DirecTV, insisting that the dying satellite TV company was using its “unchecked influence and power_” (lol) to “_unlawfully destroy an independent, family-run business.”

Then six GOP AGs piled on, sending a letter to DirecTV accusing the company of trying to censor conservatives. It’s like a big tray of bullshit lasagna.

Now this week, Senators Mike Cruz and Mike Lee have tried their best to get their faces on TV as part of this stage play, penning a latter to AT&T accusing it of participating in a conspiracy with Dominion Voting Systems (which is currently suing OAN for spreading unfounded election fraud claims):

If you cannot see the embedded image, it’s a letter from Lee and Cruz to AT&T’s board of directors and reads as follows:

We write to you with grave concern for the future of journalism and political discourse in America. Specifically, the following facts have come to our attention:

1. One American News Network (“OANN”) is being sued for alleged defamation by Dominion Voting Systems.

2. Dominion Voting Systems is owned by Staple Street Capital.

3. William Kennard is on the executive board of Staple Street Capital.

4. William Kennard is also the Chairman of AT&T’s board of directors.

5. AT&T owns 70% of DirecTV, and controls two seats on DirecTV’s board of directors.

6. DirecTV has decided not to renew its contract with OANN.

These facts raise serious questions about the role of political influence in DirecTV’s programming decisions, as well as whether AT&T’s Chairman has allowed personal financial considerations to influence his oversight of a company in which AT&T holds a majority share–possibly in conflict with his fiduciary obligations to AT&T shareholders.

We request that you respond within 10 business days to the following question: Did any employee or agent of AT&T at any time convey or suggest to any employee or agent of DirecTV an instruction or request not to renew OANN?

We appreciate your urgent attention to this inquiry, and look forward to receiving your prompt reply.

In short, the dynamic duo imply that because William Kennard, the Chairman of AT&T’s board of directors, is also on the board of private equity firm Staple Street Capital (which owns Dominion Voting Systems), this must all be some grand conspiracy to kick OAN off of DirecTV, as if Kennard can single handedly determine all of AT&T’s business proposals by himself.

In reality, OAN was kicked off of DirecTV’s lineup because not that many people watch the channel. DirecTV was spun off by AT&T into a new joint venture with private equity firm TPG Capital, and the new leadership simply didn’t think the profitability to headache ratio was worth renewing a contract. That’s it.

Remember that AT&T not only funded the creation of OAN, reports suggest it came up with the idea. It only backed away from DirecTV because its bungled $200 billion megamerger spree left it desperate for cash. TPG came in, and the focus was obviously on greater fiscal responsibility.

Cable and broadcast executives aren’t the most ethical bunch. As your cable TV channel lineup makes pretty clear, they’ll air any old bullshit provided it makes them money and doesn’t get them into legal hot water. OAN not only wasn’t really particularly popular, its unhinged claims of electoral fraud and obnoxious COVID conspiracies made the channel not worth the trouble, even for them.

Even if DirecTV axed OAN because of its content, there’s nothing illegal there. There’s nothing requiring that DirecTV mandate viewpoint neutrality across its lineup. It’s the company’s prerogative as a business to do business with whoever they’d like, something the Conservative party, you might recall, used to prattle on about at great length about before their noggins were filled with Trump pudding.

An ordinary business decision got distorted into a grand conspiracy by the Trump GOP to agitate their increasingly conspiratorial base and feed the gibberish claim that the modern Trump GOP (whose rants, opinions, and conspiracies can be found absolutely everywhere, all the time) are somehow being unfairly silenced. It’s dumb victimization porn and propaganda all the way down.

Filed Under: cable news, cable tv, conspiracy theories, disinformation, election fraud, gop, mike lee, news, propaganda, ted cruz, trump, tv, william kennard
Companies: at&t, directv, oan, oann

Six Republican AGs Try To Pretend OAN Was ‘Censored’ By DirecTV

from the traditional-conservative-values dept

Tue, Mar 22nd 2022 06:26am - Karl Bode

Last January DirecTV finally decided to kick fantasy and conspiracy channel One America News (OAN) off of their satellite TV lineup, likely dooming the “news” channel. It’s a channel relatively few people watch, and the company simply didn’t figure the controversy to income ratio was worth it, so DirecTV simply didn’t renew OAN’s carriage agreement when the time came.

OAN, of course, quickly tried to spin itself as a victim of censorship, first by attacking a Black AT&T board member in “news” coverage that pretended DirecTV’s business decision was politically and racially motivated. And last week, the company filed a lawsuit claiming that DirecTV was leveraging its “unchecked influence” to stifle a “family-run business”:

“This is an action to redress the unchecked influence and power that Defendants have wielded in an attempt to unlawfully destroy an independent, family-run business and impede the right of American television viewers to watch the news media channels and programs of their choice.”

Trying to claim DirecTV, which itself is losing subscribers hand over fist to streaming, has “unchecked influence and power” is fairly amusing. In reality, DirecTV made a fairly boring business decision to not renew a channel very few people, despite all the sound and fury, actually watch:

Nielsen has #'s for OANN in "metered markets," i.e. the country's biggest metro areas. This spring, in those markets, OANN has been averaging just 14,000 viewers. Fox News: 631,000 viewers in those same markets.

— Brian Stelter (@brianstelter) June 15, 2019

Now Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton has, for some bizarre reason, injected himself into the dispute. In a letter (pdf), Paxton and the GOP AGs of Mississippi, Louisiana, Missouri, Montana, and South Carolina demand DirecTV renew its carriage agreement with OAN, and insist the decision to kick the conspiracy channel to the curb is “clearly viewpoint discrimination and an attempt to silence conservative voices”:

“My fellow attorneys general and I strongly recommend that you reconsider your present course and renew your contract with OAN in April. Your failure to do so will not only cause you to lose millions of dollars in business, but also drive many millions of Americans to simply cancel your services outright, as President Trump and other leading figures have already called for.

I’m old enough to remember that a core GOP platform used to be that government shouldn’t involve itself in routine business decisions without exceptional cause. Yet here, six AGs took the time to take DirecTV to task simply for booting a channel from its lineup that not many people watched.

As with most modern GOP claims of this type, it’s largely performative victimization porn to keep the base angry. What the Trump GOP routinely calls “censorship” is usually just baseline levels of accountability for dumb behavior (like, say, falsely claiming in “news reports” that COVID was created in a South Carolina lab). The real goal here, as it is with the Section 230 fracas, is really to mandate that the internet and cable programming be inundated with alternative reality propaganda favorable to the GOP.

As we’ve noted previously, while AT&T originally funded and came up with the idea for OAN, the company was forced to spin DirecTV off in partnership with TPG Capital, which was likely less interested in catering to conspiratorial GOP gibberish — at least when it wasn’t making them money. Cable and broadcast executives will air anything that makes money if they can legally get away with it.

Even if this was a viewpoint-based decision by DirecTV, there’s absolutely nothing requiring that DirecTV maintain anything resembling “viewpoint neutrality.” There’s just no foundation for any complaint here. There’s nothing illegal. Again, it was a boring business decision made because the channel wasn’t making DirecTV money in ratio with the headaches (like the lawsuits over bogus claims of election fraud).

Paxton and his friends are clearly upset that the ongoing effort to create an entire alternate reality news ecosystem saw a minor setback with OAN being dumped from DirecTV, relegating the channel out of the mainstream and back into a highly competitive scrum of conspiratorial influencers and other gibberish-spewing Trump orbit hopefuls.

Of course, the Trump base will never see alternative viewpoints pointing out Paxton’s involvement here is self-serving, performative bullshit, which is the entire point of the propaganda ecosystem folks like Trump and Paxton are hoping to embolden and protect as they foist their authoritarianism on the planet.

Filed Under: disinformation, gop, ken paxton, lawsuit, propaganda, radicalization, speech, trump
Companies: directv, oan, oann

Judge Not Impressed With DOJ's Attempt To Claim Presidential Tweets And Orders Don't Mean Anything

from the nice-try dept

The DOJ wants its secrecy. The President keeps taking it away. Over the past couple of years, FOIA litigants have received unexpected support from President Trump, often in the form of tweets. While the DOJ is arguing nothing the records seekers are seeking should be handed over, Trump is tweeting out demands that everything should be released — largely due to his unwavering belief that selective transparency will somehow expose a massive Deep State operation against him and his associates.

The stuff Trump wants exposed relates to FISA court orders and other documents related to investigations of Trump’s campaign team and their ties to Russia. Trump is convinced there’s nothing there and wants the public to see this for themselves. It’s inadvertently commendable, even though there’s a strong possibility the documents won’t actually prove what Trump thinks they’ll prove.

Nonetheless, the friction between the DOJ’s FISA-related opacity and Trump’s Twitter account continues, as Josh Gerstein reports for Politico.

The Justice Department had urged U.S. District Court Judge Amit Mehta to shut down the Freedom of Information Act suit, arguing that all the unreleased parts of the warrant for former Trump adviser Carter Page remain classified.

However, Mehta said a series of factors combined to create a factual dispute denying the government victory in the case, at least for now. These included a Sept. 17 White House press release that said much of that information was declassified, Trump’s tweets four days later seeming to back away from the decision, and the Justice Department’s failure to adequately account for the statements.

The DOJ argued the tweet stating the DOJ had “agreed” to “release” the unredacted documents, as well as the White House press release ordering immediate declassification of parts of these documents, did not say the things they did. The DOJ’s legal team claimed — in a bunch of unsworn statements — the President surely meant the opposite of the things he said.

Unsurprisingly, the court does not agree.

“Defendant offers no reason to believe that the Press Release inaccurately conveys the President’s ‘directive.‘ Thus, contrary to what Defendant says, it would appear that the President did make ‘his intentions clear … to declassify information.’”

Not only that, but the DOJ ignored the press release entirely — the one containing an order these documents be publicly-released. That didn’t escape the notice of the court, which noted the DOJ did not submit anything at all referencing this order.

The DOJ also argued it could still withhold the information under other exemptions. Wrong again, the court declares. The DOJ cannot effectively nullify a presidential order simply by switching black-bar horses midstream.

The court is giving the DOJ a second chance to explain itself and its refusal to accept presidential orders and tweets at face value. But it will have to do so with sworn statements, rather than dropping a bunch of questionable assertions into the judge’s inbox. In the meantime, it will have to hope the President stops handing FOIA plaintiffs tweeted gifts.

Filed Under: doj, fisa, trump

Despite Repeated Evidence That It's Unnecessary And Damaging, Trump Signs SESTA/FOSTA

from the because-of-course dept

This was no surprise, but as everyone expected, yesterday President Trump signed SESTA/FOSTA into law leading to the usual excitement from the bill’s supporters — despite the fact that events of the past couple weeks have proved them all wrong. The bill’s supporters repeatedly insisted that SESTA/FOSTA was necessary to stop one company, Backpage.com, because (they falsely insisted) CDA 230 made the site completely immune. Except, that’s clearly not true. In the two weeks since the bill was approved by Congress, two separate courts declared Backpage not protected by CDA 230 and (more importantly) the DOJ seized the whole damn site and indicted most of the company’s execs — all without SESTA/FOSTA.

And, on top of that, many many sites have already shut down or modified how they do business because of SESTA/FOSTA proving that the bill’s reach clearly is impacting free expression online — just as tons of civil liberties experts warned. And that’s not even touching on the very real concerns of those involved in sex work on how SESTA/FOSTA literally puts their lives in danger — and how it makes it that much more difficult to actually rescue victims of sex trafficking.

As usual, Professor Eric Goldman has a pretty thorough summary of the situation, and notes that there are still a bunch of open questions — including the inevitable constitutional challenges to the bill. The retroactive clause (saying it applies to things that happened prior to the bill being signed) is so obviously unconstitutional that even the Justice Department warned that it would doom the bill if not fixed (which Congress dutifully ignored). But, to me, there’s a bigger question: whether or not a First Amendment challenge could knock out SESTA/FOSTA in the same way that it got most of the original Communications Decency Act tossed out 20 years ago (CDA 230 was all that survived of the original CDA).

I am also curious whether or not we will see any reaction from those who promoted and supported SESTA for the past year or so, when the rates of sex trafficking don’t decrease, but the ability to rescue such victims does decline. Somehow, I get the feeling they’ll have moved on and forgotten all of this. And that’s because, for most of them, “stopping sex trafficking” was a convenient excuse for trying to attack the internet.

Filed Under: cda, fosta, free speech, section 230, sesta, trump