Regulation

The House Select Committee on Competition with the Chinese Communist Party has sent a letter to Apple CEO Tim Cook questioning whether concerns about Apple’s relationship with China spurred the termination of the Apple+ series The Problem with Jon Stewart. Last month, when the show’s end was announced just weeks before taping for a third season was set to begin, the New York Times reported that Stewart and Apple parted ways over creative control issues.

The rules package, which the commission ratified on Wednesday, would empower the agency to review and investigate instances of discrimination by broadband providers to different communities based on income, race, ethnicity and other protected classes.

Broadcasters have long argued that one of the reasons they are a must-have medium is their local news programming. FCC Chair Jessica Rosenworcel is proposing to recognize — and incentivize — those efforts. Rosenworcel has proposed prioritizing the license application reviews of stations producing local programming.

Former President Donald Trump has breathed new life into a push by media companies to televise his federal trial on election-subversion charges, but the odds of cameras being in the courtroom remain slim. On Friday, Trump’s lawyers urged U.S. District Judge Tanya Chutkan to allow broadcasting of the trial, scheduled to begin in March, saying that the “prosecution wishes to continue this travesty in darkness” and that “President Trump calls for sunlight.”

In a lawsuit moved to federal court Monday, producer Jason Donner said he was part of a “purge” of employees who refused to report only information that would “appease” former President Donald Trump and his supporters.

Kevin Adell, owner of Adell Broadcasting and WADL Detroit, served WMYD Detroit a cease and desist letter after WMYD agreed to succeed WADL as the market’s The CW affiliate. The letter was hand-delivered to Scripps-owned WMYD, sister station of WXYZ.

The attorney and former executive with Vox, Hulu and AOL will oversee all legal functions across a broad range of disciplines.

He will lead all legal, compliance, and regulatory matters as well as oversee government affairs.

Catherine Herridge is on the brink of being held in contempt of court. In a late-September deposition, the CBS News senior investigative correspondent declined to reveal her source(s) for a series of 2017 stories she reported on during her time at Fox News, according to a court filing made public Tuesday. Her refusal to disclose the source(s) was in direct defiance of an alarming court order issued earlier this year, by which Herridge’s camp will surely appeal, of the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia.

The Federal Trade Commission is asking a federal judge to reject efforts by the Interactive Advertising Bureau and other outside groups to weigh in on Amazon’s side in a dispute over its alleged use of “dark patterns.” The Interactive Advertising Bureau last month argued in a proposed friend-of-the-court brief that the FTC’s allegations against Amazon amounted to an attempt “to regulate and punish truthful statements made in advertising.”

While federal efforts to require labeling of political ads using AI have yet to result in any such regulation, a few states have stepped into the void and adopted their own requirements. Even without regulation, media companies still need to be wary of the use of AI being used to generate false images of candidates for use in attack ads.  While broadcasters and local cable companies are insulated from liability for the content of ads from legally qualified candidates and their authorized committees, they can have liability for ads from non-candidate groups. Even non-regulated companies, such as streaming companies that are not subject to the Communications Act requirements that candidate ads not be censored, may have liability for the content of candidate ads.

The chief financial officer of the state of Florida wants the FCC to “immediately halt any further utilization” of Wireless Emergency Alerts on a national level. Jimmy Patronis, who also serves as the state’s fire marshal, addressed his letter to FCC Chairwoman Jessica Rosenworcel. He took issue with use of the WEA platform to send the nationwide emergency text message to cellphones and wireless devices in early October:

A reporter for The Daily Southtown received three citations from the government of Calumet City, Ill., for continuing to contact “city departments and city employees via phone and email.”

Sens. Richard Blumenthal and Marsha Blackburn cite a story on an Instagram whistleblower to push protective legislation.

Amazon founder-owner Jeff Bezos instructed executives to flood the giant ecommerce company’s search results with irrelevant ads to pump up its profits, The Federal Trade Commission charges in newly unredacted documents from its antitrust lawsuit against Amazon. During a key meeting, Bezos directed executives to “accept ‘more defects’ as a way to increase the total number of advertisements shown and drive up Amazon’s advertising profits,” the FTC document charges.

Press-freedom advocates are raising the alarm that the arrests of the Atmore News’s publisher and reporter are unconstitutional.

In early October, RTDNA and 18 other press freedom groups and national news organizations filed two key documents seeking live audiovisual coverage of the trial in United States v. Trump, the D.C. election interference criminal case currently docketed to begin in March.

The leader of America’s Public Television Stations will stay on through the selection of his successor but no later than the end of next year.

Fox is telling the FCC that documents its critics want the regulator to compel it to produce aren’t relevant to a challenge to the company’s license for WTXF Philadelphia — a challenge Fox says the commission should reject.

The FCC this week released its second EEO audit notice for 2023. The FCC’s Public Notice, audit letter, and the list of stations selected for audit is available here. Those stations, and the station employment units (commonly owned or controlled stations serving the same area sharing at least one employee) with which they are associated, must provide to the FCC (by uploading the information to their online public inspection file) their last two years of EEO Annual Public File reports, as well as backing data to show that the station in fact did everything that was required under the FCC rules. The response to this audit is due to be uploaded to the public file of affected stations by Dec. 14.

On Monday, the White House announced its own attempt to govern the fast-moving world of A.I. with a sweeping executive order that imposes new rules on companies and directs a host of federal agencies to begin putting guardrails around the technology.

The Supreme Court will hear an array of legal arguments involving social media’s free speech wars this term with a series of dicey cases that could reshape how public officials and U.S. government agencies operate online. On Tuesday, the court will hear oral arguments in the first two of those cases, which both ask whether public officials can constitutionally block their constituents on social media  — one of those cases at its core centers on a lakeside city manager in Michigan who decided he would block someone posting what he called “creepy” smiley emoji’s on his Facebook page amid criticism of the manager’s COVID-19 response.