President Donald Trump said Sunday night that ABC News and NBC News should lose their broadcast licenses, accusing both networks of “biased and untruthful” coverage of his presidency. The comments were posted on his Truth Social account.
In one post, Trump claimed the networks give him “97% BAD STORIES,” called them “an arm of the Democrat Party,” and said he would support the Federal Communications Commission revoking their licenses “because they are so biased and untruthful, an actual threat to our Democracy.”
He asked why ABC and NBC “aren’t paying Millions of Dollars a year in LICENSE FEES” in a different post, claimed that they ought to “lose their licenses for their unfair coverage of Republicans and/or Conservatives,” and added that “crooked ‘journalism’ should not be rewarded.”
Local broadcast stations, not national television networks, are licensed by the FCC under U.S. law. A station’s license is usually challenged on the basis of legal or technical compliance rather than whether political actors disagree with the news content. No formal complaint and not a specific station were mentioned in Trump’s posts.
Major mainstream media outlets have long been the target of the president’s criticism for what he sees as ‘Fake News’. President Trump’s Sunday posts follow that trend and draw new attention to the lines separating editorial judgments made by news outlets from federal regulators.
Next steps: The posts show that Trump is once again trying to exert pressure on media outlets that he claims are against his agenda. However, any FCC action would not be based on social media posts, but rather on public filings and established station-level procedures.
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