Joe Biden

Broadcast networks passed on carrying Joe Biden’s speech in Philadelphia, as the president cast MAGA Republicans as a threat to democracy. ABC ran Press Your Luck, CBS went with a Young Sheldon rerun and NBC with a Law & Order replay. CNN and MSNBC carried the address, as did news division streaming channels, but Fox News stuck with Tucker Carlson and his critique of the speech as it was happening.

The President will deliver a primetime address in Philadelphia on Thursday on the “continued battle for the soul of the nation.” The White House announced the address on Monday afternoon. The broadcast networks have yet to say whether they will pre-empt programming for the speech.

President Joe Biden said that he was “doing well” and “getting a lot of work done” in a new video posted by the White House, just hours after he tested positive for COVID. “Thanks for your concern, and keep the faith. It’s going to be OK,” Biden said in the short spot, shot on the Truman Balcony on the south side of the White House.

Jon Allsop: “It’s not uncommon for U.S. leaders to skirt press-freedom issues in choreographed encounters with foreign counterparts with questionable records in that area. But the state of threat facing Mexican journalists is hardly a faraway issue: two of the reporters killed so far this year died in Tijuana, just across the border from San Diego; in the past, Mexican journalists killed close to the US border have covered it, or lived and worked on both sides of it. And, more broadly, press freedom is uncommonly front of mind in U.S. foreign affairs right now.”

The NewsGuild-CWA is asking President Biden to urge the FCC to block the purchase of Tegna TV stations by investment fund Standard General and Apollo Global Management. The guild, the nation’s largest union representing journalists, told the President in an open letter circulated widely Thursday (June 2) that the deal “would kill journalism jobs, undermine local news and raise prices for American families.”

In a forthcoming book, a pair of New York Times reporters and CNN political analysts report that President Joe Biden “assessed” Fox News “as one of the most destructive forces in the United States.” The reporters, Jonathan Martin and Alexander Burns, say that Biden was even more critical of Fox Corp. patriarch Rupert Murdoch. According to the book, Biden told an unnamed associate in mid-2021 that Murdoch was “the most dangerous man in the world.”

President Joe Biden plans to call for new privacy laws, including one that would prohibit companies from serving behaviorally targeted ads to children. “Children are … subject to the platforms’ intensive and excessive data collection vacuum, which they use to deliver sensational and harmful content and troves of paid advertising to our kids,” the White House stated in a fact sheet outlining Biden’s State of the Union address, scheduled for Tuesday evening.

NBC Nightly News anchor Lester Holt will interview Biden in Virginia on Thursday, with excerpts to air that evening on Nightly News and Friday morning on Today. The full interview will air during the Super Bowl pregame show at an exact time to be determined. The interview will be Biden’s first of 2022, and his first formal interview since marking one year in office.

Following a meeting of the president’s Competition Council Monday, Fox News Channel’s Peter Doocy asked Biden about inflation, which is at a nearly 40-year high and has hurt the president’s public approval. Doocy called out, “Do you think inflation is a political liability ahead of the midterms?” Biden responded with sarcasm, “It’s a great asset — more inflation.” Then he shook his head and added, “What a stupid son of a bitch.”

Lawmakers say 2022 is shaping up as a pivotal year in their efforts to tighten regulations on social media and other internet platforms — and are pushing President Biden to come off the sidelines. Democrats and Republicans are working on half a dozen or more major categories of legislation dealing with online privacy and children’s safety, the transparency of companies’ data-collection practices, accountability for content posted on social media and market dominance by a handful of major players.

Biden is set to appear Friday on NBC’s The Tonight Show with comedian Jimmy Fallon. Biden will appear virtually; the White House didn’t say where he will be when he tapes the segment.

So far in his tenure, the president has given far fewer one-on-one interviews than his two predecessors. Some Democrats are asking if he could be making better use of his White House pulpit.

Republican opposition to FCC nominee Gigi Sohn could let Sens. Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema decide whether President Joe Biden secures a Democratic majority at the agency.

The White House, in a bid to avert a Republican majority over the regulator, also tapped former FCC official Gigi Sohn as a commissioner.

Jessica Rosenworcel, the acting chairwoman of the powerful regulator, campaigned vigorously for a permanent appointment. If she is confirmed by the Senate, Rosenworcel would lead an agency whose responsibilities include ensuring that millions of Americans have internet access.

President Biden has yet to nominate anyone to fill a vacant seat at the FCC. What’s more, the term of current acting Chairwoman Jessica Rosenworcel is set to expire when Congress adjourns at the end of the year. It adds up to a possible Republican majority on the commission under a Democratic administration, which could stymie the party’s efforts on a number of policies, including net neutrality standards.

President Joe Biden’s failure to nominate a fifth FCC member has forced Democrats to work with a 2-2 deadlock instead of the 3-2 majority the president’s party typically enjoys at the FCC. But things could get worse for Democrats starting in January. If Biden doesn’t make his choice quickly enough to get Senate confirmation by the end of this year, Republicans could get a 2-1 FCC majority despite Democrats controlling both the White House and Senate.

Since January, the FCC has been deadlocked in a 2-2 partisan split, and the White House has yet to nominate a new commissioner to complete the agency’s typical five-person lineup. With Congress about to emerge from its August recess, President Joe Biden has four months before the end of the calendar year to make a pick. Policy experts indicated that September is a reasonable time to expect an announcement, notably when the U.S. House of Representatives votes on the $1 trillion bipartisan infrastructure package.

The broadcast networks will break into their regularly scheduled programming at 3:45 p.m. ET Monday to take President Biden’s remarks from the East Room on the crisis in Afghanistan and Taliban forces having taken over the presidential palace and now the country as a whole.

President Joe Biden name checked The Walt Disney Co., Netflix, Google, Fox Corp. and other private companies for instituting new vaccine requirements for their employees. As he referred to the alarming rise in COVID-19 cases as the “pandemic of the unvaccinated,” the president also sought to single out major corporations that in recent weeks have instituted their own types of mandates.

The president has stacked his administration with crusaders who have spent their careers challenging corporate consolidation.

The head-scratching inside the Beltway continues as the wait for a fifth Democratic Federal Communications Commission member — and for whoever is to be named the agency’s permanent chair — continues. Initial delays were thought to involve a decision between acting chair Jessica Rosenworcel and current commissioner Geoffrey Starks. But the name of broadband backer and one-time Public Knowledge head Gigi Sohn has surfaced as a new possible alternative — and one for whom the buzz had been growing

President Biden plans to appoint lawyer Jonathan Kanter as the head of the Department of Justice’s (DOJ) antitrust division, the White House announced Tuesday, another sign of the administration’s intention to take on Big Tech.  Kanter has been a favorite pick of progressive organizations pushing for the DOJ and Federal Trade Commission to do more to crack down on anticompetitive conduct, especially in the tech industry.

The White House released the competition executive order signed by the President Friday afternoon (July 9) and it does a lot of encouraging of the FCC, an independent agency, to take a number of regulatory actions including restoring net neutrality rules. Acting FCC Chair Jessica Rosenworcel was at the signing ceremony, but she will need a third Democratic commissioner if she plans to follow the president’s lead. (President Biden cannot order any particular action by an independent agency, but he basically sent the signal he was looking for cooperation.)

The order also seeks to take aim at tech giants Facebook, Google, Apple and Amazon by calling for greater scrutiny of mergers, “especially by dominant internet platforms, with particular attention to the acquisition of nascent competitors, serial mergers, the accumulation of data, competition by ‘free’ products, and the effect on user privacy.”

A number of unions have called on President Biden to name acting FCC chair Jessica Rosenworcel to the permanent position, saying the commission is understaffed and has a lot of work to do that needs a full commission and a full-time chair. That came in a letter to the president citing her accomplishments and suggesting that there should be no further delay in naming a chair — and a third Democratic commissioner — given the big issues on the FCC’s plate.

President Joe Biden finished up his post-Vladimir Putin summit press conference with a flash of visible irritation at a question posed by CNN’s Kaitlan Collins. Later, before he boarded Air Force One for his flight back to Washington, he spoke to reporters and said, “I owe my last questioner an apology. I shouldn’t have been such a wiseguy for the answer I gave.”

President Joe Biden’s ambitious goals for broadband, including expanding access throughout the country, may remain unmet until he nominates a fifth commissioner to the FCC. That’s according to the ACLU, Center for Democracy and Technology, Free Press, Mozilla and dozens of other advocacy organizations.

President Biden still hasn’t named permanent leaders at the key agencies overseeing the tech and telecom industries, giving him a late start on confronting powerful U.S. companies. If Biden doesn’t move quickly, there won’t be enough time left for his administration to take on big targets and tackle thorny policy problems.

But the Justice Department is not commenting on whether a seemingly off-the-cuff remark by President Biden is now a policy directive.

President Joe Biden on Friday revoked former President Donald Trump’s controversial executive order that aimed to regulate social media companies’ editorial policies. The now-repealed “Order on Preventing Online Censorship” directed government officials to consider issuing rules that could tie web companies’ protection from lawsuits to the companies’ content-moderation policies.

Nearly two-thirds of Biden stories during his first two months in office were on his policy agenda and ideology, and 35% about his character and leadership style, the Pew Research Center found. For Donald Trump, three-quarters of the early stories were about his character and leadership, Pew said.