New Dumb Attack Against Gigi Sohn Tries To Shame Her For Being On The EFF’s Board

We've explained how telecom and media giants have pulled out all the stops trying to block Gigi Sohn from being seated at the FCC. That has involved a sleazy smear campaign, seeded in the press by non-profits linked to companies like News Corporation, AT&T, and Comcast, falsely accusing Sohn of being a radical extremist who hates Hispanics, rural Americans, cops, puppies, and freedom.

With Sohn freshly re-nominated by the Biden administration, a new bizarre smear campaign popped up in press outlets favorable to industry. It began yesterday with this piece in the Daily Mail by Jen Smith (which I won't link to) which accuses Sohn of having links to a purportedly scandalous nonprofit and a (gasp) dominatrix:

The nonprofit in question is the widely respected Electronic Frontier Foundation. The attack attempts to frighten rubes by making the EFF's widely well-regarded policy advocacy on SESTA/FOSTA sound sleazy and scary. The EFF of course opposed SESTA/FOSTA because the law was an unconstitutional mess that harmed free speech and made sex workers and victims of human trafficking dramatically less safe.

Sohn joined the EFF's board in 2018, so there's no actual news here. The only goal of the report by the Daily Mail's Jen Smith is to associate Sohn's name in headlines with something scandalous. It's gross, it's homophobic, and it's pretty typical of the attacks Sohn has faced for the better part of the last year as the first openly LGBTQ commission nominee in history.

The story was simultaneously run over at Fox News, which used a slightly less feral headline but still tried to falsely suggest Sohn opposes fighting human trafficking:

The goal of these attacks is to keep the FCC without a voting majority necessary to do anything popular with consumers, like holding telecom monopolies accountable, restoring net neutrality rules, restoring the FCC's gutted consumer protection authority, or bringing back media consolidation restrictions. Its purpose is also to scare Senators on the fence away from voting to confirm Sohn.

This is how this game usually works. Some seedy right wing K Street public affairs firm hired by telecom or media (usually AT&T, Comcast, or News Corporation) will approach industry-friendly journalists asking them if they'd like a scoop." Said non-scoop is then run unquestioningly by said journalists, who wind up acting more like propagandist marionettes than anything resembling a reporter.

Then in a few months or weeks, when Sohn faces down a new confirmation hearing, you'll see Republican Senators cite these reports verbatim as evidence Sohn shouldn't be seated. It's all a very dumb game designed to provide the illusion that these are genuine concerns based on genuine journalism, when the whole thing is just a big performance being orchestrated by some dodgy public affairs firm.

The entirety of the GOP opposes Sohn because that's what they've been told to do by telecom and media giants if they want campaign contributions. Said giants have also targeted Democratic Senators Mark Kelly of Arizona, Catherine Cortez Mastro of Nevada and Joe Manchin of West Virginia to prevent Sohn from getting the basic Senate majority needed to move her nomination forward.

Recall that Trump's FCC nominee, Nathan Simington, was named and confirmed to the FCC in under 30 days despite having virtually no telecom experience. In contrast Sohn, a hugely popular reformer with experience both in and out of government, is headed well into her second year of contentious hearings.

It's still very likely Sohn gets confirmed, barring some epic and corrupt stupidity on the part of Democrats (an ever-present possibility). Telecom and media giants just want the process to take as long as humanly possible, so by the time she's seated the FCC will only have enough time to handle a handful of issues before the next Presidential election risks undoing all of it.

It's fairly telling that there's so little in Sohn's record to actually criticize that industry waterboys have been forced to resort to trying to make a scandal out of Sohn's membership of a widely respected tech policy organization. Still, it's another example of how grotesquely corrupt the U.S. is, how actual reformers are held to a comically higher standard than anyone else, how our press is fundamentally broken, and why, as they say, we can't have nice things.