White House Anonymously Throws Gigi Sohn Under The Bus After Screwing Up Her FCC Nomination

Politics

from the you're-not-helping dept

Earlier this month we noted how a sleazy telecom and media giant smear campaign successfully derailed the FCC nomination of popular reformer Gigi Sohn, keeping the agency gridlocked (quite intentionally) without the voting majority to do much of anything deemed “controversial” by industry.

While the GOP and telecom giants deserve the lion’s share of the blame for Sohn’s derailed nomination (they want a feckless FCC that can’t hold AT&T and Comcast accountable for anything), there were also plenty of screw ups on the Democratic side and in the White House, where there’s also no shortage of folks without the courage or integrity to stand up to telecom lobbyists.

Biden’s White House nominated Sohn nine months late (that there was any delay at all was a surprise to one White House communications staffer I interacted with last year).

From there, Maria Cantwell repeatedly buckled to Republican calls for unnecessary, redundant show hearings. Chuck Schumer failed to whip the votes. Senators Masto, Kelly, and Manchin all ultimately buckled to bad faith industry attacks, preventing her from getting the 51 votes needed in the Senate. Sohn’s future colleagues at the FCC, Jessica Rosenworcel and Geoffrey Starks, couldn’t be bothered to offer a single instance of meaningful support as she faced down attacks, alone.

The whole thing was an embarrassing, corrupt mess, and a clear example of why government struggles to hire game-changing reformers, especially at major regulatory agencies. Yet via an anonymous quote in the Washington Post this week, some White House staffer apparently thought it would be a good idea to throw Sohn even further under the bus:

A White House official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss the nomination, said they “worked tirelessly to move Gigi’s nomination” and that at her hearings Sohn “had the chance to push back and dispel the misconceptions that dark money and influence were trafficking in.”

Except numerous sources have informed me that they did not “work tirelessly.” And it’s kind of a giant middle finger to Sohn to suggest that the onus for shaking off a massive, well-coordinated smear campaign rested entirely on her shoulders.

As Sohn notes to the Post, you’re limited as to what you can say publicly when facing such attacks, especially if you care about your personal safety as an LGBTQ+ person in the current political environment:

Sohn, who would have been the first openly gay FCC commissioner, said the implication in the articles were “clearly tied to QAnon themes about LGBTQ+ people as groomers, as perverts, as sex traffickers.” And she said she felt it put her and her loved ones at risk. 

“That was the first time I felt like ‘Oh my god, this could really rile up some crazies to come to my house … and threaten me and my family,’” Sohn said. 

Unlike the Lina Khan nomination to the FTC (which involved a prompt nomination and then shock promotion to Chair to pre-empt industry resistance), Sohn’s FCC nomination was nine months late — the biggest delay in FCC history. That provided the telecom and media industries, spooked by the Khan pick, ample runway to manufacture its ultimately successful propaganda campaign, which involved using various seedy nonprofits to falsely accuse Sohn of being a radical cop hating enemy of Hispanics and rural Americans.

The White House offered zero meaningful public messaging support of their nominee aimed at debunking any of this. Several sources have suggested to me that Sohn’s nomination could have likely succeeded if the White House had also applied more meaningful pressure on Senators Manchin, Masto, and Kelly (several of whom themselves parroted industry propaganda about Sohn). They didn’t.

That said, I also have been told that Biden personally strongly supported Sohn, prompting her to be re-nominated early this year after a contentious 2022. Even then, you never genuinely got the sense from anyone on the Democratic side that seating Sohn (or the FCC’s consumer protection authority more generally) was a meaningful priority of any kind.

That’s not just a problem for hot button issues like net neutrality. The FCC is at the heart of the White House’s plan to throw an historic $45 billion in new broadband subsidies at the nation’s digital divide. Without a functioning voting majority, the FCC can’t meaningfully hold monopolies accountable when they inevitably take subsidies for networks they fail to deliver. Or much of anything else.

Putting all of this on Sohn’s shoulders because she didn’t “push back and dispel the misconceptions” being seeded in a gullible press by telecom monopolies with unlimited budgets is a final fuck you footnote on one of the most embarrassing tech/telecom policy failures in modern history. This one will leave a mark, and sends a very clear message to popular, good faith reformers eyeing government posts.

Filed Under: broadband, digital divide, fcc, ftc, gigi sohn, high speed internet, joe biden, joe manchin, lina khan, regulatory capture, telecom, the white house