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Ginni Thomas urged Arizona lawmakers to reverse Biden's win: report

Virginia “Ginni” Thomas, the wife of conservative Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, urged Arizona lawmakers to intervene after former President Trump’s 2020 electoral defeat in the state, pressing them to set aside Joe Biden’s slate of electors and put forth “a clean slate of Electors,” according to The Washington Post.

The newly revealed communications came in emails Ginni Thomas sent on Nov. 9, 2020 — six days after the election — to a pair of lawmakers, pressing them to work on Trump’s behalf and “fight back against fraud,” according to the Post.

The explosive revelation adds a new layer of detail to previous reporting on Thomas’s efforts in the weeks after the 2020 election. The Post previously reported that she strategized with Trump’s chief of staff Mark Meadows over how to bypass the will of American voters to install Trump for a second White House term despite his loss to Biden, an outcome she described as an “obvious fraud” and “the greatest heist of our history.”

The correspondence is likely to reignite ethical questions over Clarence Thomas, who has participated in at least nine rulings related to the 2020 election and who in three decades on the bench has never recused himself due to a real or perceived conflict of interest resulting from his wife’s political activities.

Neither Ginni Thomas nor a spokesperson for the Supreme Court immediately responded to requests for comment.

Developing

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Biden’s trip to South Korea may spark a new friendship

Joe Biden, on his first visit to South Korea this weekend as president, will find in the new Korean leader, Yoon Suk-yeol, a political novice who shows it. Before taking office 10 days ago, Yoon, a former top prosecutor, had not held an elected position. He won the March 9 presidential election with a slim 0.73 percentage-points differential, or just 247,077 more votes than his main rival.

It’s amply clear that Yoon has yet to cultivate the kinds of nuance in public speeches or deftness in demeanor that are hallmarks of popular leaders. Some even have painted him as a “Falstaff-like” figure — zany, solipsistic, bibulous, and prone to gaffes. This unflattering image may yet prove to be an asset in winning over President Biden.

In Japan, Biden’s next destination, the American leader will find in Prime Minister Fumio Kishida a seasoned politician with nearly three decades of experience in government and politics. First elected to Japan’s House of Representatives in 1993, Kishida has held various senior cabinet posts. He served as minister of foreign affairs from December 2012 to August 2017, becoming the longest-serving Japanese foreign minister in the post-war era.

Biden and Kishida briefly met on the sidelines of a United Nations climate summit in Glasgow last November. And in January they held a 90-minute virtual meeting, during which the prime minister stated that “Japan would be fully behind the United States” if Russia invaded Ukraine — a position that America’s other key ally in the region, South Korea, has yet to espouse.

Such contrasts in savoir-faire and political savvy between the two East Asian leaders may spell for Biden speed bumps in Seoul and smooth sailing in Tokyo — the latter, historically, Washington’s more favored ally. But Biden may yet come away with positive impressions of the unpolished Korean leader, perhaps even more favorable than those of the sophisticated Japanese statesman. After all, Biden has seen it before — in 2009, when he was the vice president.

That November, President Barack Obama made his first visits to Japan, South Korea and China. Obama had called for a “pivot” back to East Asia after years of preponderant U.S. focus on Afghanistan and Iraq. In February 2009, Obama sent Secretary of State Hillary Clinton on her first foreign visit to Japan, South Korea and China to underscore his pivot. Obama himself visited Tokyo, Seoul, Beijing and Singapore (for the Asia-Pacific Economic Forum summit) nine months later. In a press conference with Japanese Prime Minister Yukio Hatoyama, Obama said, “I intend to make clear that the United States is a Pacific nation, and we will be deepening our engagement in this part of the world.”

But what the Pacific-focused president did not expect was the lack of cordiality and support from Japan’s prime minister. The contentious issue of the relocation of the U.S. Marine Corps air station in Okinawa, on which the U.S. and Japan had agreed in 2006, clouded the meeting. The plan was to move the military base from the populated Ginowan City to the less populous Henoko Bay, Nago, which was a conservation area. But the move was in question, as Nago’s residents strongly opposed the building of a noisy air base in their town that would also cause environmental degradation. Hatoyama opposed the move.

To make matters worse, Hatoyama took off for Singapore — to which Obama was also headed — while the American president was still in Japan, implying that he had places to go and people to see while his American visitor may be unencumbered by such a taxing schedule. In Seoul, on the other hand, Obama was warmly received by the straight-shooting President Lee Myung-bak. Thereafter, Obama considered his relationship with Lee one of his closest with another head of state, while remembering Hatoyama in his 2017 memoir as a “pleasant, if awkward, fellow.”

No such diplomatic slight will occur during Biden’s visit with Kishida. The two leaders will project a united message on America’s Indo-Pacific Strategy, through the reaffirmation of the Quadrilateral Security Dialogue (Quad), a strategic forum among the U.S., Japan, Australia and India. In Japan, Biden also will promulgate the Indo-Pacific Economic Framework (IPEF), a loose economic forum geared toward long-term competition against China, with membership that remains murky. Only a few nations in Pacific Asia — and, to date, none in the Indo-Pacific — have joined the framework. South Korea announced only this week that it would.

North Korea’s leaders in recent weeks have regaled themselves with continued missile blasts. North Korea’s threats to the region virtually guarantees that Biden’s tour will be presented as a success. Even a major weapons test by Pyongyang while Biden is in South Korea or Japan could be billed as America’s commitment to defend its allies.

Last month, Kim Jong Un and his sister, Yo Jong, issued nuclear threats against the South. Ms. Kim threatened to have her nation’s “nuclear combat force” visit upon the South “a miserable fate little short of total destruction and ruin,” while her brother stated more cryptically, “If any forces try to violate the fundamental interests of our state, our nuclear forces will have to decisively accomplish its unexpected second mission.” Taking a page out of Russian President Vladimir Putin’s playbook, the Kim siblings seek to routinize threats of nuclear attack.

Neither Yoon nor Biden will be able to present an antidote to North Korea’s growing threat. But they can send signals to Pyongyang that all options are on the table, including the redeployment of U.S. nuclear weapons or, short of that, strategic assets on a rotational basis in South Korea and its vicinity. As I testified in a congressional hearing last week, the status quo further tilts “the revisionist Kim regime in the direction of gambling on a Russia-style invasion or launching a series of serious attacks. The cost of defending South Korea against the North’s nuclear-armed forces would be incalculably greater for both Seoul and Washington should Kim Jong Un gamble on Seoul’s capitulation in the wake of Pyongyang’s preemptive nuclear strike. Only a clear message of guaranteed nuclear counterattack will deter the North Korean despot, who values above all his own well-being and longevity.”

As for Kim’s well-being, Biden and Yoon can provide an antidote to the COVID-19 crisis in North Korea. The two leaders, together with Kishida and other leaders, including China’s Xi Jinping and even Putin, can push Kim to receive medical aid, including vaccines. That Kim himself acknowledged on May 12 the virus was spreading in his capital and, two days later, called the situation a “great upheaval” in his nation’s history, indicates his considerable fear of his own mortality. Kim has never experienced an existential threat such as this. Despite playing up fears of “U.S. hostile policy” and an imminent “attack,” there has not been a U.S. attack on North Korea since the 1953 armistice or a domestic protest worthy of the name.

Neither did his father, Kim Jong Il, ever experience such a threat in his lifetime. During the famine of the 1990s, he could afford to divert and hoard food aid as hundreds of thousands of people starved to death, because ordinary people were expendable, and people could not infect others with hunger. But since people very much do infect others with COVID, Kim Jong Un may be incentivized, out of self-interest, to distribute vaccines widely.

Once Biden meets his South Korean counterpart and sees that Yoon is — besides being an unpretentious, dogs- and cats-loving baseball fan — a leader with empathy for the well-being of his compatriots in the North who is committed to protecting the human rights of all Koreans, it could very well mark the start of a close relationship.

Sung-Yoon Lee is Kim Koo-Korea Foundation Professor of Korean Studies and assistant professor at The Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy, Tufts University, and faculty associate at the U.S.-Japan Program, the Weatherhead Center for International Affairs, Harvard University. Follow him on Twitter @SungYoonLee1.

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How tuition-free college could help the student debt crisis

The $1.6 trillion student debt crisis has led President Biden to publicly consider forgiving at least $10,000 per federal borrower, yet critics of widespread student loan forgiveness argue cancelling loans for current debt holders does little to solve problems for future borrowers.  

But what if higher education were free?  

Surveys show there is an appetite for free tuition at state colleges and universities, especially when it targets qualified candidates. Politicians like Bernie Sanders and even President Biden have floated the idea of free college, invigorating the national debate over how to reign in the growing student debt crisis? 

However, a plan for tuition-free college hasn’t been able to get through Congress, as First Lady Jill Biden confirmed in February when the president’s proposal to make two years of community college free for eligible students did not garner enough Democratic votes to pass through the Senate. 

Some states have taken the matter into their own hands, offering options for a tuition-free college degree. New Mexico recently passed legislation that will provide tuition-free college to up to 35,000 New Mexicans that attend a New Mexican public or Tribal college or university. New York has also launched a scholarship program that allows eligible residents to attend certain state schools tuition free. 

The impact of tuition-free college can be significant, as the cost of college has more than doubled in the past two decades and is growing steadily by around 7 percent each year, all while wages are stagnating by comparison for young adults.  

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The cost of attendance, including room and board, supplies and other fees, is roughly $25,487 per year at a public school while a four-year private, nonprofit college can cost $53,217 annually.  

All of this has fed the debate to simply make college tuition-free, enabling easier access to higher education while simultaneously lowering the volume of debt future students need to take on — as currently 43 million borrowers collectively owe around $1.6 trillion in student loan debt. 

Brian Powell, a professor of sociology at Indiana University, told Changing America that although public opinion on loan forgiveness varies, his research shows overwhelming support for free tuition. When thinking about college prospects, one of the first things people consider is tuition, he added. 

“If we think about the future, if we think about providing opportunities for more Americans to go to college, one of the first steps would be, making it affordable and free tuition at the public level,” said Powell, who authored “Who Should Pay: Higher Education, Responsibility and the Public,” alongside Natasha Quadlin, an assistant professor of sociology at the University of California at Los Angeles.  

Powell noted support for free tuition at public institutions was especially high when targeting what they referred to as qualified students – the definition for which also varied widely among those they surveyed.  

“But whatever it meant, it meant that basically if you can get into college, then you should have tuition. That’s really it. If you qualify to be in the college then free tuition should be a viable option for you.” 

One caveat, Powell noted, is that the idea of free tuition does not address soaring costs at elite private schools. 

Meanwhile, free tuition has been the focal point of several recent presidential campaigns.  

Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) pushed the concept of free college tuition when campaigning for president, pledging to guarantee tuition and debt-free public colleges, universities and trade schools by appropriating federal funds of at least $48 billion annually. 

Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) also endorsed free college when campaigning for president in 2020, offering a slightly different approach. Warren pledged to make an additional $100 billion in Pell Grant funding available so students wouldn’t need to take on so much debt to cover the cost of attendance. 

Yet some who opposed Biden’s plan, including New Hampshire Gov. Chris Sununu (R), argued that free tuition could effectively cede control of higher education to the federal government.  

“If you go down a path where the federal government is paying the bulk of the costs, you’re really telling the federal government that they now control the system,” Sununu told The Wall Street Journal last year.  

Close to 19.4 million students attended colleges and universities in fall 2020, with a majority, about 16.2 million, attending undergraduate programs while 3.1 million attended graduate programs. Most attended public schools, at 14 million, while 5.4 million went to private institutions. 

About 75 percent of students took out loans to attend two or four-year colleges and they account for about half of the $1.6 trillion of outstanding student loan debt. The remaining 25 percent of borrowers went to graduate schools and account for the other half of outstanding debt. 

Making college free could alleviate some of the burden students take on in order to get a college degree, however Sarah Reber, a fellow of economic studies at Brookings, told Changing America that it may not be necessary. 

Reber noted that there is a lot of financial aid available to students, through funding the federal government gives to public colleges and universities and grants awarded to low-income students.  

“I think the biggest benefit of free tuition is that it’s clearer. One major problem with the way we pay for college is that, in many states, there is pretty good financial aid for low- and moderate-income families. But families don’t know that,” said Reber. 

Education data suggests something similar, showing in one academic year over $2 billion in federal student grants go unclaimed. 

Reber believes colleges could do a better job of communicating how tuition costs can be paid for through various financial aid programs and awards, emphasizing that higher education needs to be more transparent. 

Still, Powell and Quadlin’s research suggests that convincing the public of the benefits of free public-school tuition might not be that difficult.  

“Many people in our interviews also just noted that college today is as important as high school was 50 years ago. And so, making college free, just as high school was free, is a logical extension for them as well,” Powell said.  

“Everyone, almost everyone, in the United States has a friend or relative who has children who are of age to go to college,” Powell continued. “This is a benefit that would be expansive. And that would be viewed as something that will be a public good.” 

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CNN executive Meredith Artley announces departure

Meredith Artley, a CNN senior vice president and editor-in-chief of CNN Digital Worldwide, announced in a memo to the newsroom that she would be leaving the network after more than 12 years.

“I’m so proud to have played a role in guiding, growing and championing CNN’s journalism across our digital platforms for all these years. We’ve grown the team of dedicated digital journalists more than threefold. We’ve also grown the number of CNNers who do digital journalism regardless of where they sit on an org chart,” she wrote in her memo, which was obtained by The Hill. 

“We’ve doubled-down on breaking news and distinctive storytelling in many forms and on many platforms. We invested in new beats and approaches to engage audiences. Those audiences have grown massively, as has our lead over worthy competitors. And the business of digital keeps going up, with more upside to come,” she continued.

Artley said that she would be with the network for another week or two to assist in the transition. 

Her coming departure was first mentioned during a staff call, which included CNN Worldwide CEO Chris Licht, according to Axios.  

The development comes after AT&T and Discovery Inc. in April said their merger between Discovery and AT&T’s WarnerMedia, CNN’s parent company, was closed. The merged company is now known as Warner Bros. Discovery, Inc. 

Later in April, CNN announced its streaming service CNN+ would be shutting down after just one month. 

The network has also seen other high-profile departures in recent months. Earlier this year, former CNN Worldwide President Jeff Zucker announced he would be stepping down from his role after he did not disclose that he had a relationship with another CNN senior executive, Allison Gollust, who later left the network, too.

The New York Times reported in mid-February that before former New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo (D) was set to make a March 2020 appearance on CNN, Gollust had allegedly discussed interview topics with him.

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Is Congress more dangerous than the southern border?

In May 2021, in the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, the halls of Congress were empty. One year later, I’m ecstatic to see school children, staff, tourists, and my fellow members fill our nation’s Capitol, as managing COVID-19 becomes just another part of daily life. The beauty of the people’s House is its accessibility to the American public. We all have a constitutional right to petition our government for a redress of grievances, and thankfully, that right is once again accessible after the U.S. Capitol was closed for nearly two years.

Despite this wonderful change of pace and a return to almost normal, Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi recently announced the extension of remote voting through June 28 due to risks of COVID-19 as a “public health emergency.” Although the vast majority of House members are vaccinated and masks are no longer required indoors, Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) believes it is still too dangerous to properly function as a governing body and vote on the House floor in-person.

The proxy voting system has been abused by members on both sides of the aisle from the start. Instead of only proxy voting when infected or exposed to COVID-19 or when another COVID-19 related factor kept a member from traveling to Washington, D.C., members routinely stay home or travel elsewhere for any reason they please.

Simply watch any vote on C-SPAN to see the ridiculous number of M.I.A. members. Or watch a committee hearing where members tune-in from a boat, their car, or even their beds. These absent legislators are neither ill, nor exposed to COVID-19. They simply would rather be home or at other events. I warned about the consequences of lazy governance from the beginning of proxy voting and have refused to proxy vote or virtually vote in committee as a result. My constituents entrusted me with the voting card of the 4th District of Arkansas, and I intend to use it wisely and in person.

When members cannot look each other in the eyes and discuss the issues affecting Americans, solutions suffer, debate is ineffective, and policies become more partisan. Moreover, when they are not present, members cannot meet with the advocacy groups and constituents who heavily affect decision making as the experts in their respective fields. When responsibility gives way to convenience, our republic suffers.

As frustrating as Speaker Pelosi’s decision is, its hypocrisy truly came to light in April when President Joe Biden announced his decision to allow Title 42 to expire on May 23. Title 42 is an immigration order requiring immigrants to remain in their country of origin until their paperwork is processed based upon COVID-19 as public health emergency. He claims that this order is no longer needed as a health measure, ostensibly because COVID-19 isn’t an emergency anymore. Apparently, if you believe Democrats, COVID-19 is still an emergency inside the chamber of the House of Representatives, but it’s nothing to worry about on our southern border. I find that impossible to believe.

In fact, this week, a Department of Homeland Security (DHS) court filing revealed that 234,088 migrants were encountered at the border in April, the highest in DHS history. In this nod to the radical left, President Biden ignores his advisors who fear that allowing Title 42 to expire will cause a “mass migration event” and sow chaos at a time when we need stability in America.

If President Biden, the leader of the Democratic Party, can expose Americans to certain anarchy at the border by reasoning that the pandemic has come to an end, then Speaker Pelosi can insist members of Congress show up for work. Is voting in Congress more dangerous than crossing our southern border? What kind of message does this send the American people? Apparently, it’s fine to expose border patrol officers to COVID-19 and an overwhelmed border, but we must put House members in protective COVID bubbles because they’re too lazy or preoccupied to do their jobs properly.

Our nation is facing myriad crises including a historic baby formula shortage, inflation not seen in 40 years, gas prices topping $4.00 a gallon in every state, and a dangerously overrun southern border. Congress needs to do the job we were sent to Washington, D.C. to do. We were sent to advocate and vote according to our constituents’ values, but that job is simply impossible to manage effectively when the members are not in Washington, D.C. I encourage my fellow members to vote in-person regardless of Speaker Pelosi’s extension of proxy voting. We have a duty to the American people to not cut corners when dealing with policy that will drastically affect folks’ lives. I also call on the American people to hold their representatives accountable to showing up to work and give the sacred, constitutional role of legislating their full attention.

Bruce Westerman is ranking member of the House Natural Resources Committee.

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Climate change is leading to loss of sleep worldwide: study

Rising temperatures driven by climate change are negatively impacting human sleep patterns around the globe, a new study has found.

If temperatures continue to surge, the effects could slash between 50 and 58 hours of sleep per person each year by the end of the century, according to the study, published on Friday in One Earth. The impacts will be substantially larger for residents of lower income countries, as well as older adults and women, the authors determined.

“Our results indicate that sleep — an essential restorative process integral for human health and productivity — may be degraded by warmer temperatures,” first author Kelton Minor, of the University of Copenhagen, said in a statement.

“In order to make informed climate policy decisions moving forward, we need to better account for the full spectrum of plausible future climate impacts extending from today’s societal greenhouse gas emissions choices,” Minor added.

To conduct their study, the researchers used anonymized global data collected from sleep-tracking wristbands.

The data included 7 million nightly sleep records from more than 47,000 adults across 68 countries — on all continents aside from Antarctica, according to the study. Measures from these types of wristbands, the authors explained, had previously been shown to align with other independent measures of wakefulness and sleep.

On very warm nights — those with temperatures above 30 degrees Celsius, or 86 degrees Fahrenheit — sleep amounts dropped an average of more than 14 minutes, the researchers observed. They also found that the likelihood of getting less than seven hours of sleep rises alongside temperature increases.

“Our bodies are highly adapted to maintain a stable core body temperature, something that our lives depend on,” Minor said.

“Yet every night they do something remarkable without most of us consciously knowing,” he added, explaining that human bodies shed heat into the environment by dilating blood vessels and increasing blood flow to the hands and feet.

But in order for sleeping humans to accomplish this heat transfer, the surrounding environment needs to be cooler than their bodies are, according to Minor.

While previous studies in sleep labs have determined that both humans and animals sleep worse when the room temperature is too hot or cold, such research was limited by the fact that people tend to modify the temperature of their sleeping environment to make themselves more comfortable, the authors noted.

In this study, the investigators found that under normal living routines, people tend to be better at adapting to cooler outside conditions than warmer ones.

The authors also observed that residents of developing countries seem to struggle more with rising temperatures. While a lack of sufficient air conditioning may play a role, the researchers said that they could not formulate a definitive conclusion on this factor, as they did not have access to relevant data on air conditioning.

Future research on the impact of rising temperatures on sleep, they noted, should focus on how sleep loss is unequal globally — with a particular look at the world’s most vulnerable populations who reside in the hottest environments.

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Kellyanne Conway: Media coverage of daughter was 'unconscionable and unforgivable'

Kellyanne Conway, a former top aide to ex-President Trump, says she is still bothered by the way news outlets covered the social media postings of her teenage daughter around the time she left the White House.

“There is this unspoken rule among civilized adults, that kids are off limits. The idea that so many adults violated that, twisted it around and burned it to the ground in the summer of 2020,” Conway said during an exclusive interview for an upcoming special on Fox News, portions of which were shared Friday with The Hill. “To cover my 15-year-old daughter’s social media postings is unconscionable and unforgivable. I’m a staffer in the White House. And they are outing and exposing my teenage daughter.”

Claudia Conway, then 15, gained a large following during the summer of 2020 for TikTok and Twitter posts swiping at Trump and referencing the clashing views of her parents.

Kellyanne Conway is married to George Conway, a conservative lawyer and founding member of the anti-Trump political organization the Lincoln Project.

She left Trump’s White House in August 2020, and George Conway has since left the Lincoln Project but remains a frequent guest on cable news shows critical of Trump and his allies. Trump often attacked Kellyanne Conway’s husband directly while she worked for the president, on one occasion calling him a “loser” in a tweet.

The public interest in the opposing political viewpoints of the Conways spurred many outlets to write about Claudia Conway’s social media postings and the opinions she would offer about her family and personal views on politics and culture.

Kellyanne Conway says it was wrong of those outlets to focus on her daughter, who was, as she puts it, “doing what a lot of teenage girls do. Posting pictures, having fun with her friends, pushing back on authority, including mom and dad, expressing her political and cultural views. All of which I’ve always encouraged for all four of my children.”

“I want them to be their own people, independent thinkers,” the former White House counselor said.

Conway is currently promoting “Here’s the Deal,” a new book on her personal life, her decision to leave the Trump administration and the journey that led her to the White House. Fox’s special on Conway will air Sunday evening, with a special director’s cut available afterward on Fox Nation, the network’s streaming service.

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It’s time to bring the public interest standard to digital platforms

Last week Sen. Michael Bennet (D-Colo.) introduced the Digital Platform Commission Act, which the press release described as “the first-ever legislation in Congress to create an expert federal body empowered to provide comprehensive, sector-specific regulation of digital platforms.”

Calls for such a regulatory body have been circulating for years, with many analysts debating whether the nature and scope of the concerns raised by digital platforms fit neatly within the regulatory authority or expertise of existing regulatory bodies such as the Federal Trade Commission or the Federal Communications Commission.

One particularly notable aspect of the proposed legislation is that it brings to bear a regulatory concept that has remained on the margins of most policy deliberations about digital platforms, but is long overdue to be a focal point of how platform regulation should move forward — the notion of the “public interest, convenience, and necessity.”

The public interest principle appears four times in the Digital Platform Commission Act. Specifically, the act directs the new commission to regulate digital platforms to ensure their operations remain consistent with the public interest. It also calls for the creation of transparency and disclosure obligations to enable trusted third-party research and analysis consistent with the public interest. 

To understand what a public interest model for digital platform regulation might look like, it’s helpful to revisit the concept’s history as a framework for broadcast regulation. 

The public interest principle has been the lynchpin of broadcast regulation since the creation of the Federal Radio Commission (later renamed the Federal Communications Commission) in 1927. The public interest regulatory model is built on the notion that certain entities (e.g., broadcasters) merit designation as public trustees, and as such can be subject to government-mandated public interest obligations directed at meeting core policy goals such as protecting children, preserving and promoting competition, providing access to diverse sources and content, and cultivating an informed citizenry. 

Importantly, meeting these public interest obligations has often infringed, to some degree, on the speech rights of broadcasters. Nonetheless, the Supreme Court has found this regulatory framework to be consistent with the First Amendment.

However, the general consensus over the past decade and a half has been that there is little that digital platform regulation can learn or borrow from broadcast regulation. According to this line of thinking, broadcast media and digital platforms are too fundamentally different for similar regulatory frameworks to be employed. In the earliest days of my work on a book that would ultimately end up being titled “Social Media and the Public Interest,” I recall being told by a media law scholar whom I admire that the public interest was too much of an “old media term” to be relevant to contemporary discussions about digital platform regulation. 

In the years since this conversation, we have seen digital platforms replicate many of the harms and concerns that motivated Congress to impose the public interest regulatory framework on broadcasting. Propaganda, disinformation (both medical and political), and content harmful to minors — all of these concerns that are front and center in current debates about digital platform regulation were similarly key drivers of the origins and evolution of broadcast regulation.

Perhaps the divide between “old” and “new” media is not as vast as we’ve been led to believe. 

There has, of course, been plenty to criticize about how the public interest standard has been defined and applied throughout the history of broadcast regulation. Some have argued that the principle has remained vague to the point of being meaningless. Others have argued that it has, at times, been too strongly associated with industry interests; or that it has been reduced to a reflection of consumer demand. We certainly don’t want to romanticize the history of public interest regulation in broadcasting. 

But nor do we want to ignore it. We can certainly learn from this checkered history. We can revisit it, and try to deduce from this history those aspects of this regulatory framework that might be relevant to how we approach digital platform regulation and those aspects that might not. 

The Digital Platform Commission Act opens the door to a much larger — and long-overdue — conversation about how our legacy model of media regulation can potentially be adapted to modern digital platforms. Through the concept of the public interest, we can begin to construct a much-needed regulatory framework that treats large digital platforms as public trustees, with, as the act specifies, a “duty of care” to the millions of citizens who rely on these platforms for news and information, and who grant these platforms access to unprecedented quantities of their personal data.  

As much as we have been inclined to treat these digital platforms that have dramatically transformed our media ecosystem as new and unprecedented, the path forward in regulating them may actually be found in looking back at how we’ve regulated our media in the past.  

Philip M. Napoli is the James R. Shepley Professor of Public Policy in the Sanford School of Public Policy at Duke University, and Director of the DeWitt Wallace Center for Media & Democracy. His most recent book is “Social Media and the Public Interest: Media Regulation in the Disinformation Age.” 

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Two Secret Service employees sent home from South Korea after alleged incident with taxi driver

Two Secret Service employees are being sent back to the U.S. and placed on administrative leave, the Secret Service said in a statement Friday, after the employees allegedly got into a confrontation with a taxi driver in South Korea while they were apparently intoxicated.

Secret Service Chief of Communications Anthony Guglielmi said the employees’ actions, which occurred while they were off duty, “may constitute potential policy violations.”

“We have very strict protocols and policies for all employees and we hold ourselves to the highest professional standards. Given this is an active administrative personnel matter, we are not in a position to comment further,” he said.

The incident was first reported by ABC News, which cited two sources briefed on the matter. 

The sources told the outlet the two employees went out to eat before visiting several bars and appearing to become intoxicated. In a taxi that night, they allegedly got into an argument with a taxi driver that led to a call to police.

One of the employees was investigated by authorities. No one was detained or criminally charged in connection with the incident.

One source told ABC News the police filed a report on the matter. The employee who allegedly got in the argument will be interviewed by local police before returning to the U.S., the outlet reported.

The incident comes as President Biden traveled to South Korea on Friday, beginning his first trip to Asia as president. ABC News reported that Biden was on his way to Asia when the decision to send home the employees, who were helping to prepare for the president’s visit, was made.

Guglielmi said the incident had no impact on Biden’s trip.

Biden gave a speech at a Samsung factory in South Korea on Friday, during which he vowed to strengthen diplomatic relations between the U.S. and the country. 

“We’re standing at an inflection point in history where the decisions we make today will have a far-reaching impacts on the world we leave to our children tomorrow,” Biden said in Pyeongtaek. “This vibrant democracy has become a powerhouse of global innovation by investing in educating its people.” 

“This is the moment, in my view, to invest in one another, to deepen our business ties, to bring our people living closer together,” Biden added.

Source: TEST FEED1