Fire away…

5G Will Not Make Your Plane Fall

The U.S. aviation industry has been in a tizzy this week over fears that Wednesday’s launch of national 5G cellular service would create chaos by interfering with aircraft sensors. Ten major airlines wrote to the Biden administration predicting that the “nation’s commerce will grind to a halt.” Sure enough, come Wednesday, a number of airline flights were canceled, including all of Emirates’ U.S. flights. Emirates president Tim Clark called the 5G rollout “delinquent, utterly irresponsible.”

But by Thursday, the story had already fizzled. As commerce trundled along unfazed, several airlines un-canceled their flights and the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) announced that at least 78 percent of the U.S. commercial fleet would be unaffected in any way by the 5G rollout. Some observers went so far as to label the issue “incredibly dumb.” The main remaining question was why it had even turned into a thing in the first place.

The dispute had been brewing for years. Cell-phone networks have long been eager to get their hands on a high-frequency slice of the radio spectrum called the C band, which would allow them to transmit more information faster. Last year, the FCC, which regulates use of the spectrum, auctioned off the rights to a section that lies between 3.7 and 4 gigahertz. AT&T and Verizon paid nearly $70 billion for the privilege and made plans to begin 5G service over that frequency band in December.

The aviation industry was not happy about this. Officials at the FAA worried about interference with radar altimeters, which use pulses of radio-frequency radiation to measure how far above the ground a plane is. These devices operate in a frequency range of 4.2 to 4.4 gigahertz — not overlapping with the 5G band, but close enough that the new technology could cause interference capable of throwing off an altimeter’s readings. While planes have multiple ways to determine their altitude, radar altimeters are crucial in one particular scenario: when a plane is landing on autopilot in low-visibility conditions, specifically when the cloud ceiling is less than 200 feet above the ground.

There’s reason to believe that under such circumstances, a compromised altimeter could pose a real hazard. In 2009, Turkish Airlines Flight 1951, a Boeing 737, crashed while coming in to land at Amsterdam’s Schiphol Airport, killing nine of the 135 people on board. Investigators later determined that a radar altimeter had been feeding faulty data to the plane’s autopilot. More recently, the aviation website The Air Current reported this week that radar altimeters have been giving glitchy readings on airplanes landing at Palm Beach International Airport in Florida.

But while such incidents sound scary, there are all sorts of reasons why instruments can give erroneous readings, and so far no problems have been definitively traced to 5G. Meanwhile more than 40 countries around the world have rolled out 5G networks, and none have reported any problems. Given that the risk so far remains essentially hypothetical, the question becomes: How far is it really necessary to go to protect the safety of America’s airways?

As the controversy simmered, the 5G rollout was delayed until January 5, then pushed back again until January 19. The FAA reviewed the planes and altimeters used in the U.S. fleet and determined that many common aircraft, including most Boeing and Airbus models, would be able to operate safely after the new 5G service was switched on. But it was not so sure about the Boeing 777 and 787, planes that make up a significant portion of the international long-haul fleet.

The airlines and Boeing maintained their resistance. In the spirit of compromise, AT&T and Verizon agreed on Tuesday to not switch on cell towers within a certain distance of airports, and to operate at reduced power. In a sign of how overheated the controversy had become, President Biden stepped into the fray on Tuesday, issuing a statement thanking the phone companies for their flexibility and promising that the 5G networks would be deployed without any risk to aviation safety.

The phone companies’ conciliatory moves were not enough for everyone, however. While American carriers shelved plans to cancel flights, foreign airlines ANA, British Airways, Emirates, and Japan Airlines suspended certain flights.

Bearing in mind that the interference problem would only be an issue with certain planes, under a narrow range of meteorological conditions that did not happen to apply on Wednesday, the flights’ cancellation could not be justified purely on safety grounds. Even if low ceilings had occurred, there would be no risk, only inconvenience: Inbound flights would either have had to hold until the weather improved or divert to another airport.

Airline executives’ alarmist rhetoric had even less basis. On Thursday, the FAA announced that all Boeing 787 and 777 — the model that Emirates was using for its canceled flights — were actually safe to fly. In response Emirates announced it would resume the flights.

As underwhelming as the 5G aviation-disaster story turned out to be, it is worth recognizing the context in which it took place. Airlines spent years telling passengers that using their cell phones in-flight was dangerous for the operation of the aircraft, a danger that was never borne out in practice and which the airlines eventually stopped talking about. Meanwhile conspiracy theorists have taken to promoting paranoid visions of 5G cell service causing cancer, autism, COVID-19, and worse. So when the U.S. government itself starts warning about the dangers of phone technology for aviation, it resonates in all kinds of ways that aren’t necessarily helpful for rational debate.

What happens next? Probably nothing interesting. Whatever legitimate concerns over interference remain in the weeks to come will presumably be worked out through a technical process of testing and adjustment, as it has in more than 30 countries where 5G service has already been successfully rolled out. As FCC Chairwoman Jessica Rosenworcel said in an official statement Wednesday, “We know that deployment can safely coexist with aviation technologies in the United States, just as it does in other countries around the world. The FAA has a process in place to assess altimeter performance in the 5G environment and resolve any remaining concerns.”

In other words, no chaos will ensue. It will all be fine. Americans can stream Marvel movies without planes falling out of the sky.

In Medicine, a Lack of Courage Has Helped Put Roe in Jeopardy

This Saturday marks the 49th, and quite possibly the last, anniversary of Roe v. Wade, the 1973 Supreme Court ruling that legalized abortion in every state. Roe’s precarious future can be attributed to various factors: the tenacity of the anti-abortion movement, the addition of three conservative justices to the court during Donald Trump’s presidency, the opportunities that pro-choice advocates may have missed. But if, as is widely expected, the Supreme Court upholds a Mississippi statute that bans most abortions after 15 weeks of pregnancy and overturns or guts Roe later this year, I will be thinking about something else: not the legal precedent, but the role that lawlessness and terrorism — and the medical community’s response to it — played in hastening Roe’s demise.

The act of terrorism that particularly haunts me took place on Oct. 23, 1998. That evening, an obstetrician-gynecologist named Barnett Slepian was standing in the kitchen of his home in Amherst, N.Y., a suburb of Buffalo, when a sniper’s bullet struck him in the back. He collapsed to the floor and, within a few hours, was pronounced dead. At the time, Dr. Slepian was one of three abortion providers in the Greater Buffalo area. One of the others was my father, Shalom Press, an obstetric gynecologist who performed abortions on certain days in his private practice.

The grief that visited the family of Dr. Slepian, who was survived by his wife, Lynne, and four sons, could just as easily have engulfed my family. This feeling was magnified a few days after the sniper attack, when the Amherst police called my father to inform him that The Hamilton Spectator, a newspaper in Ontario, had received an anonymous warning that he was “next on the list.” Several packages filled with anti-abortion literature had been delivered to the same paper. One of them contained a photograph of Dr. Slepian with an “X” drawn over his face.

Although the murder of Dr. Slepian came as a shock, it was not exactly a surprise. Five years earlier, David Gunn, an abortion provider in Pensacola, Fla., was shot dead by a man who lingered outside the clinic and reportedly screamed, “Don’t kill any more babies!” before opening fire. A few months later, an anti-abortion zealot named Rachelle Shannon attempted to murder George Tiller, an abortion provider in Wichita, Kan. (Dr. Tiller survived, only to be shot again, this time fatally, by another anti-abortion extremist in 2009.)

Dr. Slepian’s murder was part of a string of sniper attacks targeting abortion providers in their homes. In Buffalo, as elsewhere, the lethal violence was preceded by years of protests and blockades that turned the places where abortions were performed into battlegrounds. At my father’s office, women were routinely screamed at and harassed, to the point that some would come through the doors in tears. There were threatening phone calls and acts of vandalism. On several occasions, protesters invaded the office and once even chained themselves together with bicycle locks. Demonstrators at my father’s office and in front of my parents’ home accused my father of being a “baby killer.”

This violence and harassment did not stop every doctor who believed women should have access to abortion from continuing to serve as a provider. In my father’s case, it had the opposite effect, deepening his commitment and resolve.

But it did help to isolate abortion from mainstream medicine, in part by dissuading countless physicians from incorporating the procedure into their medical practices, as my father did at his office. Had a critical mass of doctors adopted this approach, the crisis in abortion care that exists today, where many women in the South and the Midwest are forced to travel more than 100 miles to find a clinic, might not have reached such an acute stage. Abortion might have become a more routine part of reproductive health care, with more OB-GYNs seeing it as part of their professional responsibility. By 2017, just 1 percent of abortions were performed in private offices, owing in part to the fact that doing so carries risks that most physicians, including many who are sympathetic to abortion rights, generally prefer to avoid.

My father got a sense of this when, at one point, he joined a group practice near downtown Buffalo. As far as he knew, the doctors in the group were pro-choice. Some even performed abortions in city hospitals on occasion. But they didn’t do them at the practice.

That individual physicians might wish to avoid turning themselves — and, potentially, their patients, co-workers and families — into targets of wrath and violence is understandable. Less understandable is the failure of the mainstream medical community, and an array of powerful institutions within it, to respond to the hostility and violence directed at clinics and abortion providers by affirming support for them. Hospital officials could have stepped forward to assert that they, too, would help ensure that abortion services remained available, particularly in states and communities where clinics were under siege. Medical school deans could have announced that they would redouble their commitment to providing training in abortion to residents at teaching hospitals.

Taking such steps would have demanded courage. Little such courage was shown. By 2017, the percentage of all abortions done in hospitals had dwindled to 3 percent, and many teaching hospitals impose restrictions on performing abortions that are more stringent than the legal requirements in their states. Although the reasons for this vary, the desire to avoid the stigma associated with abortion, and the risk of provoking abortion opponents, looms large, according to Lori Freedman, a medical sociologist who has studied the phenomenon. “Some hospital administrators are afraid the hospital will become targeted by anti-abortion forces for doing procedures at all,” she said. “Some have had such experiences already.”

Residents and medical students affiliated with the group Medical Students for Choice have pushed for more comprehensive abortion education. But at many universities and residency programs, in-house abortion services do not exist and residents must go to an outside facility such as a local Planned Parenthood clinic to receive training in the procedure.

To be sure, the relationship between mainstream medicine and abortion was ambivalent even before such concerns became widespread. As the sociologist Carole Joffe has noted, most of the nation’s leading medical organizations failed to issue any significant guidelines on abortion immediately after Roe was decided. That reticence reflected the conflicted feelings many doctors had about a procedure that some linked to infamous back-alley “butchers,” and that others associated with feminists who were claiming authority over their bodies in ways that made many male doctors uncomfortable. (Notably, although the American Medical Association asserted in a 1970 resolution that the principles of medical ethics “do not prohibit a physician from preforming an abortion,” the document stated that abortion procedures should be determined by the “sound clinical judgment” of medical professionals, not “mere acquiescence to the patient’s demand.”) Some doctors also believed that abortion was morally wrong.

In subsequent decades, professional associations such as the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists “danced around the issue” of abortion for fear of alienating members who might not support abortion rights, said Doug Laube, an abortion provider who served as ACOG’s president from 2006-2007. Though the organization is formally pro-choice, Dr. Laube told me that during his tenure as president he observed that the stigma associated with abortion made ACOG reluctant to “advocate for abortion services as regular, normal medical care.”

There has been some recent progress on this front, most notably an amicus brief submitted to the Supreme Court by dozens of medical organizations, including ACOG and the A.M.A., in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, the case that could lead to Roe’s reversal later this year. The brief affirms that the restrictive Mississippi abortion law under review in the case is “fundamentally at odds with the provision of safe and effective health care.” Meanwhile, a new generation of abortion providers, many of them women motivated by a sense of social justice, has begun to emerge, in a field that includes family medicine doctors as well as OB-GYNs.

But even if Roe somehow survives the Dobbs case, the provision of abortion already has been transformed in ways that have left millions of women, particularly poor women and women of color, without access to services. The failure to embed abortion in mainstream medicine has made it easier for abortion opponents to target clinics with so-called TRAP (targeted regulation of abortion providers) laws that impose increasingly onerous rules and regulations on them. A wave of restrictive state measures has been enacted in recent years. It has also set the stage for laws like S.B. 8, the Texas statute enacted last year that encourages private citizens to sue anyone who performs or “abets” abortions after six weeks of pregnancy, including medical practitioners.

Why pay TV operators are dropping Trump-loving cable networks

Before One America News Network host Dan Ball finished an interview with guest Jim Jordan last week, he asked the Ohio Republican congressman for a favor.

“Please put some pressure on AT&T and DirecTV for us,” said Ball, whose nightly program “Real America” airs nightly on the right-wing cable channel. “OAN would love to continue broadcasting on that platform and we know for a fact it is all political behind the scenes on why they’re doing that to us.”

Earlier in the week, Ball solicited viewers to send him “dirt” on William Kannard, chairman of of the board for DirecTV parent AT&T, including any evidence of marital infidelity. OAN’s 80-year-old founder, tech entrepreneur Robert Herring, also went on camera to plea with viewers to ask other cable and satellite providers in their areas to add the channel to their lineups.

The desperate calls for help — which would be considered unseemly on a traditional cable news outlet — follow DirecTV’s Jan. 15 announcement that it will drop the San Diego-based OAN from its service in April. DirecTV, which AT&T spun off last summer, accounts for nearly half of the 35 million homes that can receive OAN on cable or satellite TV. The channel is not broadly distributed enough to be measured by Nielsen.

The loss of DirecTV will deprive the channel of its major source of revenue and cast doubt on the future of the operation, where President Biden’s administration is called a “regime” and concerns about the COVID-19 pandemic are described as hysteria. OAN correspondents have promoted efforts to audit the vote counts in the 2020 election.

OAN is not be the only conservative outlet losing distribution. Newsmax, the Boca Raton, Fla.-based channel that is the TV home of former President Trump’s first press secretary, Sean Spicer, was dropped from four cable systems in January after it failed to reach new carriage agreements with those companies.

The two channels gained notoriety in recent years by seeking out conservative viewers who believe right-leaning Fox News, the dominant ratings leader in cable news, did not show enough unwavering fealty to Trump. Both believe it’s now open season on conservative outlets.

“We count 11 liberal news and information channels in a typical cable package, with Fox News Channel and Newsmax as the only alternatives,” Newsmax Chief Executive Chris Ruddy said in a statement to The Times. “All Americans are harmed when any voice, liberal or conservative, is closed down. We believe that society as a whole benefits from more discussion and political views being represented, not less.”

Progressive groups, which have lobbied companies to drop OAN, lauded DirecTV’s decision.

“The network is a known perpetrator of disinformation and extremism, fueling real-world violence and placing the health and safety of so many in jeopardy,” said Yosef Getachew, director of Common Cause Media & Democracy Program.

A 2017 Washington Post story on OAN based on internal emails from the company, noted how Herring directed his channel to avoid any negative stories about Trump, who regularly promoted the outlet on his Twitter feed.

As late as March 2021, an OAN correspondent, Pearson Sharp, said in a report, “There’s still serious doubts about who’s actually president.” In another, he suggested COVID-19 vaccines are causing mass deaths.

OAN, Newsmax and Fox News, are all being sued for defamation by voting technology companies Smartmatic and Dominion. Both firms allege their reputations were damaged by false statements presented by anchors and guests who echoed Trump’s claims that the 2020 election was rigged against him.

The lawsuits could create significant liabilities and a heap of bad publicity for the networks, complicating their relationship with distributors. The networks have said they were within their 1st Amendment rights to report on election fraud allegations made by well-known public figures, including Trump his advisors and members of Congress.

The pay TV providers who dropped OAN and Newsmax make the case that it’s not politics that drove their decisions, but the upended economics of their business.

Cable and satellite companies are coping with subscriber loss as the emergence of streaming services, such as Netflix, disrupts TV habits. The number of pay TV homes declined by nearly 9% through the first nine months of 2021, according to research firm MoffettNathanson. DirecTV has seen significant subscriber losses as well.

The cost of a cable package is a major factor in the consumers’ decision to cut the cord, which means service providers are under pressure not to raise rates. Cable bills creep up when the cost to carry programming is passed along to consumers.

DirecTV did not comment on OAN beyond its initial statement saying the decision to drop it came “after a routine internal review.” The company’s chief executive Bill Morrow did offer an explanation in a memo to employees obtained by The Times.

Morrow said carriage decisions on channels are based on “industry trends such as secular decline, programming price increases, competitive offerings with lower price points, our competitors’ offers, and consumers’ desire to have more narrow bundles.”

Breezeline, the Quincy, Mass.-based cable company formerly known as Atlantic Alliance, took a similar stance in its comment on its decision to part with Newsmax.

“While we worked in good faith to negotiate a fair agreement, Newsmax insisted on terms and conditions that we could not accept,” said Andrew Walton, a spokesperson for Breezeline. “The decision was not related in any way to the content on the network.”

Walton added that Newsmax’s demands for a higher fee “would have resulted in increased TV fees for all Breezeline customers — for a channel that is free online to other viewers.”

Newsmax can be streamed online without a pay TV subscription, a selling point the company has touted to Fox News fans who are reluctant to drop cable. (Fox Nation, the streaming service operated by Fox News, shows the cable channel’s programming only on a delayed basis and has no live news programming.)

While the loss of carriage on Breezeline and other small carriers will not significantly cut into the 54 million homes that carry Newsmax, other cable providers could cite the service’s free stream as a reason to drop it from their channel lineups in the future.

“It could be canary in the coal mine,” said one veteran cable distribution executive who was not authorized to discuss the matter publicly.

Newsmax has noted it picked up carriage on 170 pay TV systems since Nov. 2020. While Newsmax has expressed support for OAN publicly, its executives privately distance themselves from their more extreme competitor.

Newsmax is still a major comfort zone for Trump supporters — its biggest ratings come from live coverage of the former president’s rallies, which Fox News no longer airs. But Newsmax declared Biden the winner of the 2020 election — something OAN resisted — and has been a strong supporter of COVID-19 vaccines.

As for OAN, the loss of revenue through DirecTV — Herring told his viewers the company gets 10 cents a month per subscriber — will mean it has to substantially alter its business model to survive. (The company did not reply to a request for comment.)

OAN could be offered as a direct-to-consumer subscription service or a free advertiser-supported video-on-demand steaming channel. Herring also has a multichannel subscription streaming service called KlowdTV that includes OAN.

“We don’t know exactly what we are going to do yet,” Herring told viewers. “But don’t worry, we have a lot of options.”

I don’t think DirecTV has much life left in this decade. But there are plenty of other “free” platforms to get the RW rubbish party lines.

Biden added another Trumper to the USPS Board of Governors.https://t.co/GYEkZ8oulB

— Scap 🌹 left turn at Albuquerque (@scapelliti) January 21, 2022

Today is the 49th anniversary of #RoeVWade, a landmark case for women’s health care. In 2022, women’s rights are under attack! We must protect women’s right to choose in this country. Send me to Congress to #codifyRoe. I stand with you. 💙🇺🇸https://t.co/PqCNdUV4k4

— Allen Ellison Democrat for US Senate Florida (@AllenLEllison) January 22, 2022

116 workers at REI in New York City are unionizing with @RWDSU, @UFCW. pic.twitter.com/zoPVrrSJ4g

— Daily Union Elections (@UnionElections) January 22, 2022

Kroger workers' strike in Colorado ends after 10 days, tentative deal reached https://t.co/EnOQwKvQ7y

— Kara Turrentine (@karaturrentine) January 22, 2022

happy #caturday to all union cats, soon to be union cats, and subaltern cats scratching at the ossified structures of cat labor law https://t.co/6ZMApJzOJN pic.twitter.com/zLUIvWvWXP

— Labor Notes Pilled (@MarchOnTheBoss) January 22, 2022

Counting 15 Starbucks election petitions filed in 14 days pic.twitter.com/6nKQgEeh8A

— Brandon Magner (@BrandonMagner) January 22, 2022