A day after using a primetime address to renew claims of election fraud, President Trump turned his anger on the television networks that had declined to carry it live, saying they should lose the right to broadcast at all.
What he said
Mr. Trump called for ABC and NBC to be stripped of their broadcast licenses after the two networks chose not to air his Thursday speech live, keeping their regular programming instead. He argued that networks using public airwaves owe the public coverage of the president, and framed their decision as a kind of fraud that "should mean a revocation of their licenses." Both networks made the speech available on their streaming services, and CNN also declined to carry it live on television.
Why the demand runs into a wall
The threat, however, misdescribes how American broadcasting is regulated. The Federal Communications Commission does not license the national networks like ABC and NBC at all; it licenses individual local television stations, some owned by the networks, many independently owned affiliates, and it is those station licenses, not the networks, that come up for renewal. A president, moreover, cannot revoke a license by decree. The FCC is an independent agency, and pulling a license requires a formal proceeding with evidence, notice and appeals.
Beyond the mechanics lies the Constitution. Federal law bars the FCC from censoring broadcasters, and the First Amendment protects a station's editorial judgment about what to air, including the decision not to carry a political speech. Legal scholars broadly agree the agency has no authority to punish a broadcaster for its viewpoint or its coverage choices, and no license has ever been revoked on such grounds.
The reaction
Press-freedom groups condemned the demand as an attempt to intimidate the news media into more favorable coverage. Advocates argued that threatening a broadcaster's license over an editorial decision is precisely the kind of government pressure the First Amendment exists to prevent, whether or not the threat is ever carried out. The networks did not offer detailed public responses, and the FCC did not issue a formal statement. Neither ABC nor NBC signaled any change in how it would cover the president.
The bigger picture
The episode is the latest flashpoint in a running conflict between the administration and the broadcast press, one that has included regulatory scrutiny of network programming and repeated threats aimed at outlets whose coverage the president dislikes. Even if the license demand goes nowhere, as legal experts expect, its significance lies in the message: that the government's most powerful office is willing to tie a news organization's right to operate to the content of its coverage. For a free press, defenders argue, the threat itself is the point, and the reason it matters even when it cannot be carried out.
