President Donald Trump wants to lean even harder than ever on Federal Communications Commission chair Brendan Carr to strip broadcast licenses from networks that don’t do his bidding — but he is playing with fire, a legal expert warned.
According to Politico, the drama kicked off after NBC and ABC both declined to carry Trump’s Thursday night prime-time address on election security live, prompting the president to demand the Federal Communications Commission strip both networks of their broadcast licenses entirely. Trump didn’t hold back on Truth Social, framing the snub as evidence of corruption.
“Fraud like this should mean a revocation of their licenses,” Trump said.
It’s a threat that has popped up periodically as Trump vents against the media; in one of the most glaring examples, CBS backed out of allowing Stephen Colbert to broadcast an interview with Democratic Texas Senate candidate James Talarico as the FCC re-evaluated longstanding rules about political interviews. “The View” has also come under scrutiny.
If Carr actually follows through on threats to revoke broadcast licenses, though, said First Amendment litigator Robert Corn-Revere of the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, it would come back to haunt Trump.
“We’ve never in this country had a law that permits a royal decree for news coverage,” he told Politico. “If you expressly link a licensing proceeding to whether or not the networks are airing coverage that the president wants covered, then whatever legitimacy that those proceedings might have had is automatically diminished if you link them.”