News

Stations that serve rural areas neglected by corporate media would lose their funding.

WASHINGTON — On Thursday, President Donald Trump proposed the elimination of all federal funding for public broadcasting, a main revenue source for local PBS and NPR stations across the country.

There’s a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to rethink how people around New Jersey stay up to date with what’s going on in their communities and the state. The state’s participation in the recently concluded FCC spectrum auction, in which it sold off its old public-TV licenses, is bringing in hundreds of millions in new public revenues.

TRENTON — Free Press Action Fund on Wednesday called on the New Jersey legislature to use money from the auction of the state’s public-TV stations to create the New Jersey Civic Information Consortium, a joint initiative with four of the state’s leading universities to invest in community-information needs.

Last Thursday, Verizon proudly announced that it would begin offering “data-free streaming,” joining a growing number of carriers that are letting customers stream videos and music from specific services without it counting against monthly usage caps. That might sound like a sweet deal, but it also undermines the basic principles of Net Neutrality.

Republicans in Washington are showing they really don’t care much about your online privacy.

Internet privacy rules just got a step closer to being rolled back. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell on Friday added his name to the list of co-sponsors of a resolution that would undo FCC rules preventing broadband internet providers from collecting certain kinds of customer information.

You might think that the head of the Federal Communications Commission would object to President Trump’s incendiary description of news organizations as “the enemy of the American people.” But you’d be wrong.

A coalition of 171 public interest groups have sent a letter to Federal Communications Commission and Senate leaders urging them not to kill the agency’s 2015 Net Neutrality rules. In the letter, groups including Consumers Union, Public Knowledge, the ACLU, EFF, Free Press and more note that the rules have massive public support.

FCC Chairman Ajit Pai has wasted no time in scaling back rules passed by his Democratic predecessor, Tom Wheeler.