Simington Talks China and News Distortion With Bannon
FCC Commissioner Nathan Simington told former Breitbart executive Steve Bannon in an appearance on Bannon’s podcast Friday that China is using 5G to surpass the U.S. in industrial automation and that President Donald Trump’s confidence in Chairman Brendan Carr is “fully justified.” Deployment of 5G in China is “not that much consumer” but “lots in the industrial sector, lots of private networking that is just for running particular factories, medical facilities, logistics facilities, et cetera,” Simington said. “People always assume that China was going to be late to automate because they had such a large pool of unskilled, low-wage labor,” but it's “front-running this” and has a rate of robotics adoption seven times what was predicted, Simington said.
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Asked about the FCC’s news distortion proceeding against CBS, Simington praised the complaint from the Center for American Rights. That complaint, which was the basis for the proceeding, “is the first well-pleaded news distortion complaint I’ve ever seen in my life,” he said. Numerous broadcast attorneys and most comments filed in the proceeding have said the CAR complaint fails to satisfy the basic requirements of the FCC’s distortion rule (see 2503250043). Simington also condemned former President Joe Biden’s administration for clamping down on COVID-19 misinformation online. “We're supposed to be a democracy,” Simington said. “We're supposed to tell the government what it's supposed to do. It's not supposed to try and warp our minds in a direction that's favorable to whatever policy they may think we should be following, whether we like it or not.”