President Joe Biden
This past Monday, President Joe Biden held an event at the White House where he unveiled a more than $42 billion investment in high-speed broadband internet around the country. According to President Biden, this funding comes from both the American Rescue Plan (signed into law in March 2021) and the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act (signed in November 2021). The President indicated that the legislation passed thus far included “$25 billion for high-speed Internet in places where it was out of reach, for schools and libraries to help students connect to the internet if they couldn’t do it at home.” Now, says President Biden, the new funding will “be distributed to 50 states, Washington, D.C., and territories to deliver high-speed Internet in places where there’s neither service or it’s too slow.” The breakdown of such funding includes, for example, over $3.3 billion dedicated to Texas, over $1.8 billion to California, and more than $1.1 billion for Florida.
The President’s broadband investment plan is designed to “connect every person in America to reliable high-speed Internet by 2030.” However, President Biden stated that:
[I]t’s not enough to have access. You need affordability in addition to access. That’s why we worked with internet service providers to bring down prices for Americans struggling with internet payments. It’s called the Affordable Connectivity Program. It’s helping 19 million families save around $30 a month on their internet bills, and some save a lot more.
In short, this was a very important announcement about something that improves people’s lives and helps individuals, students, businesses and others conduct their activities more efficiently. It’s great for our economy and will create jobs as well.
However, at least according to a number of people (such as Mastodon user Kailee @skykiss@sfba.social), “[n]ot a single news outlet aired President Biden’s event.” If that is the case, the fault lies in several places, including with the news media, the Biden administration, Democratic leaders in Congress and in the states, and elsewhere.
Part of the issue behind inadequate news coverage of accomplishments like this one is that broadband internet, part of the wider subject of “infrastructure,” isn’t considered sexy. It’s not a missing Titanic-seeking submersible vehicle. It’s not a Russian missile attack on Ukraine. It’s not another Donald Trump indictment over espionage. It doesn’t fit the news adage “if it bleeds, it leads.”
Also, many people have observed that the mainstream news media are biased against President Biden, and against Democrats generally. For example, the media will spend many hours of airtime talking about Hunter Biden‘s laptop, but not much time on Joe Biden’s concrete plan to help millions of people use their laptops.
Nevertheless, the Democrats (including President Biden and the White House communications team) who come up with legislation to help Americans need to do a better job of touting (we hesitate to say “selling,” but lets face it, all politics is marketing) their accomplishments. This can include, for example, repeatedly hitting the networks with announcements about events such as the one on Monday, and getting Cabinet officials onto the Sunday morning TV news talk shows to tout this and other accomplishments by the Biden administration. In one hopeful sign, Monday’s event is the beginning of the Biden administration’s “Investing in America Tour,” a three-week series of appearances in which, according to the White House:
President Biden, Vice President Harris, First Lady Jill Biden, Cabinet members, and Senior Administration Officials will barnstorm across the country to highlight how President Biden’s Investing in America agenda is driving a manufacturing and clean energy boom, rebuilding America’s infrastructure, lowering costs, and creating good-paying jobs.
That is a good start, and more such activities are needed. Additionally, President Biden and the Democrats should have an army of bloggers and social media users who can spread the news of these accomplishments on their own networks, including social media, blogs and other platforms. If such an army is not formally organized, then let’s take our own initiative to make these efforts. If enough people do this, then (a) many folks will find out the news directly, and (b) the mainstream media will have a harder time ignoring it. Hopefully, this blog post can be considered part of such an effort.
Photo by Maryland GovPics, used under Creative Commons license. https://is.gd/WGEZXd
