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Dems Accused of Caving to 'Rabid' Telecom Industry Smear Campaign Against FCC Nominee
The digital rights group Fight for the Future tweeted late Thursday that President Joe Biden and Senate Majority Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) promised to restore Obama-era net neutrality rules, of which Sohn was a chief architect.
"But instead they're sitting on the sidelines while Big Telecom mounts a massive dark money-funded smear campaign against their nominee to the FCC, Gigi Sohn," Fight for the Future added. "Where's the leadership? Do what you said you would do."
Fight for the Future director Evan Greer said Thursday that "it is absolutely absurd that millions of people from across the political spectrum fought for and won net neutrality at the FCC."
Ajit Pai, who chaired the FCC during the Trump administration, "repealed it, Dems promised to restore it, and they've so far failed to do so by caving to industry pressure and slow-walking" Sohn's nomination, Greer added.
"The only reason for this is corruption. Plain and simple," she charged, adding that it is a "good time to remember that Comcast, AT&T, Verizon etc. are huge donors to Democratic leadership and candidates. They've got their hands all up in there."
The campaigner also said that while the telecom sector and others--including the Fraternal Order of Police (FOP)--attack Sohn, "Dem leadership is nowhere to be found defending their nominee."
Greer pointed to a piece that Scott Roberts, senior director of criminal justice campaigns for Color of Change, wrote for The Root last year, declaring that the FOP is "one of the largest and most powerful hate groups in the country" and "acts as the guardian, enforcer, and perpetuator" of "racist police culture."
The FOP has openly opposed Sohn, citing her "forceful advocacy of end-to-end encryption and 'user-only-access'" and claiming that her employment history, public policy stances, and social media activity "indicated serious animus towards law enforcement officers and the rule of law."
The FOP on Wednesday released polling it commissioned from Morning Consult, which asked U.S. registered voters various questions, including some about Sohn.
"In the poll, 65% of voters had no opinion on this nominee. But after seeing information and social media posts about her extreme positions on policing issues, 6 in 10 said they would be less likely to support the nomination," said FOP national president Patrick Yoes. "For those who say Ms. Sohn's nomination will impact their vote in the Senate's midterm elections, 60% say they are more likely to vote for a Republican candidate--which is very significant in states like Arizona, Colorado, Georgia, Nevada, and Washington."
Critics framed the FOP polling as part of the ongoing efforts to tank Sohn's nomination.
"The smear campaign against [Sohn] has been beyond ridiculous," said Techdirt founder Mike Masnick. "Everyone who knows anything about her knows that it's pure nonsense, that she's beyond qualified, and that she will do an amazing job."
"The smear merchants are doing it *because* they know she'll do a good job," added Masnick, who was responding on Twitter to similar comments from technology writer Karl Bode.
Bode had tweeted of the FOP polling that "this is part of a manufactured smear campaign being run by AT&T and Comcast against a highly qualified and extremely popular FCC nominee literally everyone in the telecom/media space knows would be great on telecom monopolization, broadband affordability, and media consolidation."
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'Infuriating': Telecom Lobbyists Spending Big Money to Keep Gigi Sohn Off FCC
Writing for Techdirt on Friday, Bode blasted the FOP's "not-at-all-scientific poll" as well as the "grotesque campaign" by telecom giants to "spread harmful gibberish in a bid to either flip or provide flimsy justification" for right-wing Democratic senators opposing her nomination.
He also wrote:
The Biden team isn't faultless here either. It took the Biden administration nine months to even nominate Sohn, giving the telecom industry... ample time to galvanize opposition. Team Biden also hasn't done anything to defend Sohn publicly, or apply any meaningful pressure on the Senate confirmation voting process. Nor have Sohn's future FCC colleagues voiced any public support, despite the shamelessness of the attacks.
Which, in turn, is fairly reflective of how the federal government doesn't really take stuff like telecom monopolization and telecom consolidation seriously, especially in an era where "Big Tech" has sucked all the oxygen out of the D.C. policy room. And again, this is all occurring in an era when D.C. pretends to be interested in "bipartisan antitrust reform," revealing the hollowness of the gambit.
In a series of tweets Friday, Bode warned that "it is going to be an EXTREMELY long and painful decade if Democratic strategists don't start pulling their heads out of their asses and start displaying something vaguely resembling urgency, passion, and creativity."
"The phony appeal of authoritarianism can only be defeated if the [Democratic National Committee] shakes off corruption and truly represents the public interest," Bode added. "You don't accomplish this by letting a hugely popular media and telecom reformer drown under unopposed GOP/telecom propaganda attacks."
Comcast-Owned MSNBC in the Tank for Joe Biden's Presidential Run
Comcast, one of the biggest lobbying spenders in Washington, also owns MSNBC, which has showered Biden with favorable coverage both before and since his announcement.
In March, Nevada lieutenant gubernatorial candidate Lucy Flores published an article in New York Magazine (3/29/19) that described how Biden inappropriately kissed her at a campaign event. Biden has quite a long history of awkward and inappropriate touching, kissing or groping of women and girls.
Mika Brzezinski (MSNBC, 4/1/19) defends Biden's "physical style with women" with former DCCC staffer Adrienne Elrod.
Mika Brzezinski, co-host of MSNBC's Morning Joe, was one of the first to defend Biden (4/1/19). Brzezinski suggested that Flores' allegation was politically motivated, citing Flores as a "huge Bernie person," and asking, "Are we just supposed to take all the words and the fact she said she was violated at face value?" Her guests later that day (4/1/19), former DCCC chief of staff Adrienne Elrod and former CIA and DoD chief of staff Jeremy Bash, seemed to agree that such #MeToo accusations against Biden were "meaningless moments," and merely baseless finger-pointing from Biden's political opponents.
Brzezinski continued her defense of Biden the following day and later in the week on Morning Joe, after another woman came forward with allegations of inappropriate behavior (4/2/19, 4/5/19). Brzezinski said that the allegations were "sad," and that Biden is a "nice guy" and "not a predator." She continued:
This is ridiculous. The conversation has gotten out of control, and Democrats and those on the left who want to tweet me today and go nuts and get all woke, you're eating your young. You're eating those who can beat Trump. You're killing the very people who have been pushing women ahead, who've been fighting for equal pay, who have been doing everything they can to respect women in their lives. We're going to after Joe Biden for being affectionate to women of all ages, and to men as well? It's ridiculous.
While he is indeed a frontrunner, defense of Biden as supposedly the only candidate with the ability to beat Trump is frequently parroted by many corporate Democrats (and by totally, definitely well-meaning Republican Party figures as well). MSNBC contributor Mike Barnicle recently re-upped this trope (4/24/19) on the day of Biden's announcement, though to his credit, Axios' Jim Vandehei did push back on this narrative.
Joe Biden (11/18/93) assures the Senate: "It doesn't matter whether or not they're the victims of society. The end result is they're about to knock my mother on the head with a lead pipe, shoot my sister, beat up my wife, take on my sons."
On another Morning Joe panel (4/26/19), MSNBC correspondent Rev. Al Sharpton criticized Biden's role in drafting and sponsoring the 1984, 1986, 1988 and 1994 crime bills, and his treatment of Anita Hill during the Clarence Thomas confirmation hearings. Biden recently issued a half-apology phone call 28 years after the fact to Hill, who told the New York Times (4/25/19) that the call "left her feeling deeply unsatisfied." (Biden continued to dance around giving a full-throated apology to Hill in an appearance on The View--4/26/19.) But despite Sharpton's misgivings about Biden's history, he maintained that Biden somehow had the "equipment despite the hurdles" to appeal to both "blue collar white workers" and "black and brown communities."
On the same program, Joe Scarborough castigated Biden detractors, maintaining that they failed to understand the context of Biden's past support for harsh drug laws, opposition to school integration and support for the Iraq War. He later added that "it's easy for you to sit there behind your laptop, drinking your soy lattes in 2019 judging [him] for trying to make the country better." Sharpton chimed in with further attacks on so-called "latte liberators" and "limousine liberals."
But despite his folksiness (Extra!, 4/13), if there is anyone who serves the interests of financial giants who spend most of their time in limousines, it's Joe Biden. Since the late 1970s, Biden has been the chief defender of the Delaware-based credit card industry in Congress, and played a crucial role in the passage of the 2005 bankruptcy law, which made it harder for Americans to wipe out and restructure unreasonable debts through Chapter 7 bankruptcy. Indeed, credit card company MBNA (formerly owned by Bank of America) was Biden's second-largest donor throughout his Senate career. When Biden drafted the original version of the bankruptcy bill in 2000, he was strongly opposed by then-Harvard Law professor Elizabeth Warren, who was integral in getting the Clinton administration to block its passage. Biden has also been a consistent supporter of further financial deregulation, such as the Gramm-Bliley-Leach Act, which has been pointed to as a partial cause of the 2008 financial collapse.
Yet Biden's extremely checkered political history, where he was consistently on the wrong sides of issues like women's rights, racial equality, financial regulation, drugs and criminal justice, surveillance, and war, still doesn't seem to be enough for the media to deem him damaged goods. In fact, outlets like MSNBC still play up Biden as the most viable candidate, despite the fact that there are others with similarly long tenures in politics who didn't make Biden's same mistakes.
Earlier in the year, Alex Altman came on MSNBC to praise Biden's "electability" (2/21/19), while this week Steve Kornacki devoted a whole segment to prove just how "electable" Joe Biden is for the Democrats in a 2020 matchup against Trump (4/25/19). No other candidate, not even the other front runners, received such a segment from the network.
Indeed, calling Biden the most "electable" candidate is really just code for the most "moderate" or white candidate. Such a designation for Biden discounts the appeal of candidates who are left-wing, female or people of color. In particular, left-wing candidates like Bernie Sanders (the other frontrunner) and Elizabeth Warren are each frequently dogged in corporate media by accusations that they are somehow not "electable" enough.
There is perhaps an underlying logic to these attacks. Warren and Sanders have each called for heightened antitrust regulation. (Amy Klobuchar and Corey Booker have also called for increased antitrust enforcement, but are a bit more tepid on the issue than Sanders and Warren.) Big tech companies, agricultural conglomerates, food and beverage companies, banks and telecom companies like Comcast would surely come under the antitrust microscope and be targeted for breakups if one of these candidates were to win the Democratic nomination. Comcast, in particular, stands out as a major target, considering they have interests in both media content production as well as distribution.
Comcast, along with other internet service providers (ISPs) like Verizon and AT&T, holds what are essentially regional monopolies, where they very rarely directly compete with one another in a given area. As of 2017, almost 80 percent of US households have access to just a single ISP that offers broadband speeds of over 100 Mbps. This has a striking impact on US internet users: The nation has just the 20th fastest average internet speed in the world, and, according to the FCC, US consumers pay more for broadband than most other comparable countries. Of course, ISPs are also famous for their unmatched customer service record-Comcast ranks as one of America's most hated companies year in and year out, along with many other ISPs.
Much of the power of Comcast and other telecom companies to maintain their monopolies can be attributed to the revolving door that shuffles telecom lobbyists in and out of government positions. The current FCC chair, Ajit Pai, is the former general counsel for Verizon, while its past chair, Tom Wheeler, was a longtime telecom industry lobbyist for trade groups with connections to Comcast. Meredeth Attwell Baker, a former FCC commissioner under Obama, joined Comcast just four months after giving the greenlight for Comcast's merger with NBC Universal. The acquisition marked the beginning of other vertical mergers between content distributors and content producers, including AT&T's acquisition of Time Warner, which owns CNN.
During his Senate career, Biden was far from a hawk on antitrust, supporting antitrust exemptions for the soda industry after receiving donations from Coca-Cola. Judging by the Obama administration's extremely lax antitrust approach, a hypothetical Biden administration would follow the same friendly approach towards corporate interests. Biden hasn't stayed away from discussing the issue of antitrust so far in his campaign, but he has remarked that big corporations shouldn't be "singled out." At a speech last year to the Brookings Institution, he remarked, "I don't think 500 billionaires are the reason we're in trouble. The folks at the top aren't bad guys."
Such deference to massive and unpopular corporate monopolies is anathema to both a healthy economy and contrary to the views of most Americans. But potential antitrust targets like Comcast and AT&T have the ability to manufacture positive press for pro-corporate water carriers like Biden through their news properties. Powerful executives like Comcast's David Cohen might not be shooting out daily emails to MSNBC staff ordering them to promote Biden's candidacy, but employees will often gravitate towards what their employers want. After all, they are well aware of who signs the checks.
Likewise, top MSNBC news personalities exist within the same elite circle of Washington insiders that Biden has inhabited for the past 40 years-in just about every one of the aforementioned segments, one host or guest remarked on their personal relationship with Joe Biden. The insider DC cocktail party circuit doesn't contain very many people who want to attack their corporate benefactors.
It's notable that even before its acquisition by Comcast, MSNBC had a history of tacking to the right and a distinct reluctance to challenge entrenched corporate interests. What's more, the network devotes little interest to economic policy, let alone antitrust, preferring to spend most of its time covering Russiagate.
However, this could change. Since entering the race, Biden has been subject to criticism from his left flank, and will likely remain a target. Sanders recently fired shots at Biden in a fundraising email, calling out his fundraiser with Cohen. Warren added to her long history of criticizing Biden by attacking him for his support of banks and credit card companies during the financial crisis.
However, MSNBC has failed to even mention Biden's fundraiser with Cohen. I can't imagine why.
Hours After Entering 2020 Race, Biden to Attend Big-Money Fundraiser Hosted by Comcast, Blue Cross Execs
"The core values of this nation, our standing in the world, our very democracy, everything that has made America America is at stake," Biden said. "That's why today I'm announcing my candidacy for president of the United States."
As Politico reported on the eve of Biden's 2020 announcement, the former vice president "raised the alarm about fundraising" in a conference call with top donors, expressing the need to have a big first-day haul.
"The money's important," Biden reportedly said during the call, according to a anonymous participant who recounted the remarks to Politico. "We're going to be judged by what we can do in the first 24 hours, the first week."
While Biden has vowed to join most other 2020 Democratic candidates in rejecting campaign contributions from lobbyists, HuffPost's Kevin Robillard pointed out that Biden's planned fundraiser with corporate executives Thursday evening "shows the limitations of such a pledge."
Though Cohen is technically not a registered lobbyist, he directs Comcast's lobbying operations--a distinction that critics said allows him to skirt federal lobbying regulations.
According to the Philadelphia Business Journal, "Cohen sent an email to potential contributors Wednesday soliciting donations of $2,800, the maximum federal primary contribution for the event."
Politico first published the invitation for the large-dollar fundraiser:
As Sludge's Donald Shaw reported, Comcast "has been a leading voice in the telecommunication industry's efforts to oppose net neutrality rules, spending millions on lobbying against laws at the federal and state levels that would prohibit internet service providers (ISPs) from giving priority treatment to certain types of traffic."
"In 2006, when he was a senator from Delaware serving on the Judiciary Committee, Biden said that he did not think net neutrality rules were needed," Shaw noted.
The list of executives and other wealthy donors expected to attend Biden's first fundraiser as a 2020 presidential candidate sparked concern:
While Biden clearly joins the crowded race with top name recognition, the status as the last-serving Democratic vice president, and the frontrunner in most national polling, it has been widely noted that he also begins his third campaign for the presidency--he ran unsuccessfully in both 1988 and 2008--with an enormous amount of political baggage.
As columnist Jim Newell detailed at Slate on Thursday:
Biden's biggest challenge in the primary will be a compromised past spanning nearly 50 years. The vetting process he'll face in the Democratic Party of 2019 will not be even close to the vetting he faced during his last campaign in 2008--and, let's face it, as a middling-to-lower-tier candidate then, he didn't face much vetting at all. The crime bill that he authored in 1994 is considered by the modern iteration of the party to have been an embarrassment, as is his handling of the Clarence Thomas Supreme Court nomination. Some of his anti-busing rhetoric from the 1970s was, even by the standards of 1970s anti-busing rhetoric, astonishing. As a senator who for 36 years represented Delaware, a small fiefdom run by banks, his economic record has more than a few blemishes, such as his support for the 2005 bankruptcy reform bill, one of the slimiest pieces of legislation passed this century. In the first presidential primary since 2004 where past votes regarding the Iraq war shouldn't be an issue among major candidates, simply because it was so long ago, there's Joe Biden, with a vote for the Iraq War on his record.
The size of the field is a representation of the candidates' belief that all of this will sink Biden, unlocking the tentative support of roughly one-third of the party for the taking. The field's bet on Biden's fallibility is now shared among the punditry too. Everything Biden does will be interpreted through the same knowing lens that he's out of his element and it's a pity no one was able to dissuade him from launching this last, egotistical crusade. That was the interpretation when, in his first public appearance after allegations of inappropriate touching, he cracked a couple of jokes about how he had gotten permission to give hugs. Even the delay in his launch this week prompted another round of head-shaking, when his initial plan to kick off the campaign on Wednesday in Charlottesville, Virginia, followed by a couple of rallies in Pennsylvania, was scrapped.
Biden's campaign launch comes as most early polls show the former vice president with a slight lead over Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) for the Democratic nomination.
The former vice president addressed the allegations of inappropriate touching in a video earlier this month, vowing to "be more mindful and respectful of people's personal space" in the future.
"That's my responsibility and I will meet it," Biden said.
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