November 19, 2024

In the News

New Hampshire Union Leader (via Yahoo News): Judge in Bow wristband lawsuit rules on several motions ahead of hearing

By Paul Feely

.....The judge in a First Amendment lawsuit filed against the Bow School District has ruled on several procedural motions filed by attorneys for both sides, ahead of a Nov. 21 hearing on a preliminary injunction request.

The plaintiffs in the lawsuit — three parents and a grandparent — claim their rights were violated when they were barred from school grounds over their silent protest of a transgender athlete playing in a girls soccer game.

Attorneys from the Institute for Free Speech and attorney Richard J. Lehmann filed the lawsuit in U.S. District Court in Concord in September on behalf of Kyle Fellers, Anthony "Andy" Foote, Nicole Foote and Eldon Rash.

Trump Administration

Washington Post (Tech Brief): Trump is empowering conservatives critical of Big Tech

By Cristiano Lima-Strong

.....When it comes to reining in Big Tech, so far the populists seem to be winning out.

Trump in recent weeks has tapped a slew of conservatives critical of tech giants such as Google and Meta for key roles on his transition team or next administration. The moves could foreshadow a more adversarial posture toward Silicon Valley titans than during Trump’s first term, when key federal enforcers were criticized for not targeting those companies more forcefully.

FEC

FEC Weekly Digest: Week of November 11 – 15, 2024

.....The Commission made public 11 closed cases, as follows…

MUR 7146R

COMPLAINANT: Campaign Legal Center and Catherine Hinckley Kelley

RESPONDENTS: Correct the Record and Elizabeth Cohen, in her official capacity as treasurer (CTR); and Hillary for America and Elizabeth Jones, in her official capacity as treasurer (HFA)

SUBJECT: The complaint alleged that CTR made impermissible in-kind contributions to HFA by coordinating on CTR’s activities in support of Clinton.

DISPOSITION: The Commission previously considered the matter and closed the file. On September 12, 2024, the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia remanded the matter to the Commission for further action. On October 10, 2024, the Commission dismissed the matter. Chairman Sean J. Cooksey, Vice Chair Ellen L. Weintraub, and Commissioners Shana M. Broussard, Allen J. Dickerson, Dara Lindenbaum, and James E. “Trey” Trainor, III issued Statements of Reasons.

FCC

New York Post: Trump picks Brendan Carr to lead FCC — calls him ‘warrior for Free Speech’

By David Propper

.....President-elect Donald Trump has picked senior GOP Federal Communications Commissioner Brendan Carr to lead the agency, he announced Sunday night.

Calling him a “warrior for Free Speech,” Trump enthusiastically praised Carr, 45, who he first nominated to serve as an FCC commissioner in 2017 during his first term in the White House.

“His current term runs through 2029 and, because of his great work, I will now be designating him as permanent Chairman,” Trump, 78, said in a statement…

“Thank you, President Trump!” Carr wrote in a statement on X Sunday night. “I am humbled and honored to serve as Chairman of the FCC. Now we get to work.”

“We must dismantle the censorship cartel and restore free speech rights for everyday Americans,” he later tweeted.

Fox News: FCC Commissioner announces probe into Big Tech, ‘NewsGuard’ fact-checking platform: ‘Censorship cartel’

By Gabriel Hays

.....Federal Communications Commissioner Brendan Carr sent a letter to the heads of the Big Tech platforms last week alerting them that their companies will be investigated for their alleged roles in mass censorship of Americans in recent years.

Carr addressed Alphabet Inc. CEO Sundar Pichai, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella, and Apple CEO Tim Cook in an open letter calling on these companies to hand over information that will allow the FCC to understand how censorship has been conducted against the American people and prevent it going forward. 

"Over the past few years, Americans have lived through an unprecedented surge in censorship. Your companies played significant roles in this improper conduct. Big Tech companies silenced Americans for doing nothing more than exercising their First Amendment rights," the commissioner wrote.

Congress

Inside Radio: House Bill Looks To Block Any FCC-Created Rules On AI-Generated Political Ads.

.....FCC Chair Jessica Rosenworcel’s time leading the Federal Communications Commission may now be limited, but a proposal to require political ads that are produced with the help of artificial intelligence feature on-air disclosures remains pending. If Rosenworcel were to go forward with the idea, a bill introduced in Congress could derail the effort.

Rep. Andrew Clyde (R-GA) has introduced the Ending FCC Meddling in Our Elections Act (H.R. 9913) that would prohibit the FCC from adopting rules regarding the disclosure of artificial intelligence-generated content in political radio and TV advertisements.

“The FCC’s last-ditch effort to regulate campaign advertising before the most important election in our nation’s history is undoubtedly rooted in partisan politics,” Clyde said in a statement. “This clearly marks an abuse of regulatory authority, which is why we must prohibit Americans’ hard-earned tax dollars from funding the FCC’s misguided attempt to regulate political speech.” Reps. Jim Baird (R-IN), Harriet Hageman (R-WY), Doug LaMalfa (R-CA), and Claudia Tenney (R-NY) are cosponsoring the legislation.

Candidates and Campaigns

New York Times: How Kamala Harris Burned Through $1.5 Billion in 15 Weeks

By Shane Goldmacher

.....Vice President Kamala Harris spent a remarkable $1.5 billion in her hyper-compressed 15-week presidential campaign. But in the days since losing to President-elect Donald J. Trump, her operation has faced questions internally and externally over where exactly all that cash went.

Despite her significant financial advantage, Ms. Harris became the first Democratic presidential candidate to lose the national popular vote in two decades, ceding every battleground state to Mr. Trump.

Her cash-rich campaign spared no expense as it hunted for voters — paying for an avalanche of advertising, social-media influencers, a for-hire door-knocking operation, thousands of staff, pricey rallies, a splashy Oprah town hall, celebrity concerts and even drone shows.

The Media

The Hill: The mainstream media still doesn’t get Trump — or Middle America

By Bernard Goldberg

.....Maybe because I’ve been a working journalist my entire adult life, I’m not nearly as interested in who’s to blame for Vice President Kamala Harris’s loss as I am in seeing how President-elect Donald Trump’s victory revealed (once again) how out of touch so many journalists are — how disconnected they are from all those folks who live west of Manhattan but east of Malibu.

Online Speech Platforms

Pew Research Center: America’s News Influencers

By Galen Stocking, Luxuan Wang, Michael Lipka, Katerina Eva Matsa, Regina Widjaya, Emily Tomasik and Jacob Liedke

.....A unique Pew Research Center study provides a deeper understanding of both the makeup of the news influencer universe and its audience. The project includes an in-depth examination of a sample of 500 popular news influencers and the content they produce, derived from a review of more than 28,000 social media accounts. We also conducted a nationally representative survey of Americans to better understand who regularly gets news from news influencers.

Key findings about news influencers

• About one-in-five Americans – including a much higher share of adults under 30 (37%) – say they regularly get news from influencers on social media.
• News influencers are most likely to be found on the social media site X, where 85% have a presence. But many also are on other social media sites, such as Instagram (where 50% have an account) and YouTube (44%).
• Slightly more news influencers explicitly identify as Republican, conservative or pro-Donald Trump (27% of news influencers) than Democratic, liberal or pro-Kamala Harris (21%).
• A clear majority of news influencers are men (63%).
• Most (77%) have no affiliation or background with a news organization.

New York Times: Substack’s Great, Big, Messy Political Experiment

By Jessica Testa and Benjamin Mullin

.....Its recent push into politics began in September last year when Mr. McKenzie wrote in a memo that he wanted the 2024 campaign to be “the Substack election.” It was a response, in part, to moves by tech platforms like Meta’s de-emphasis of political content on Facebook and Instagram.

“They bowed out entirely and created this huge opening for us,” said Catherine Valentine, whose hiring as Substack’s head of politics was announced in Mr. McKenzie’s memo. Ms. Valentine, a former producer at CNN and publicist for The Washington Post, was put in charge of building Substack’s profile in the politics world — a world that revolved, for years, around Twitter.

New York Times: Liberals Are Left Out in the Cold as Social Media Veers Right

By Sheera Frenkel

.....If the election underscored anything about the internet, it was how far social media platforms had moved to the right. While Facebook, Instagram, TikTok and other sites continue to be popular gathering places for entertainment and meme-making, political discourse online has increasingly shifted to an array of mostly right-wing sites that have built up their audiences and stoked largely partisan conversations.

The change was an unintended consequence of a series of decisions made by some of the biggest social platforms nearly four years ago.

The States

Washington Post: Kari Lake settles election defamation case brought by Arizona official

By Yvonne Wingett Sanchez

.....A year-long defamation case against Kari Lake, who falsely blamed a local Arizona election official for her 2022 defeat for governor and has sowed distrust in American election systems, has been settled.

The details of the settlement are confidential, according to two people familiar with the terms, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss a private settlement. A court docket in Maricopa County Superior Court stated Sunday that “an agreed upon settlement disposition has been reached as to all parties and claims.”

Maricopa County Recorder Stephen Richer, who brought the lawsuit against Lake, her husband and others, said in a text message Sunday that “both sides are satisfied with the result.”