A Reporter's Unwelcome Questions Provoke Yet Another Trump Threat To Yank Broadcast Licenses
The president thinks TV networks have a legal obligation to cover him the way he prefers. The FCC's chairman seems to agree.
"I think the license should be taken away from ABC because your news is so fake and it's so wrong," President Donald Trump told Mary Bruce, the network's chief White House correspondent, on Tuesday. That comment is just the latest example of Trump's threats to punish journalists who annoy him by revoking broadcast licenses, a pattern that began during his first term.
As Trump sees it, broadcasters have a legal obligation to treat him fairly. And if they fail to do so, he thinks, they should lose the licenses that allow them to transmit programming over "free airwaves from the United States government." That position reflects Trump's general antipathy toward freedom of the press, which he seems to view as a privilege subject to government approval rather than a right guaranteed by the Constitution.
Bruce provoked Trump's ire by asking questions that he viewed as inappropriate during a Q&A session with him and Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman (MBS) at the White House. Trump's friendly meeting with MBS was striking evidence of the crown prince's rehabilitation seven years after the 2018 murder and dismemberment of the dissident journalist Jamal Khashoggi at the Saudi consulate in Istanbul. The assassins were agents of the Saudi government, and U.S. intelligence agencies concluded that MBS had authorized the operation. Given the evidence that "you orchestrated the brutal murder of a journalist," Bruce asked MBS, "why should Americans trust you?"
MBS conceded that Saudi agents had killed Khashoggi, although he implied that he had not commissioned the assassination. "It's really painful to hear" that someone was illegally killed for "no real purpose," he said, and "it's been painful for us in Saudi Arabia." But he added that "we did all the right steps of investigation" and "we've improved our system." The assassination was "a huge mistake," he said, and "we are doing our best [to ensure] that this doesn't happen again."
Judging from that response, even MBS thought Bruce's question was valid and worth addressing. But as far as Trump was concerned, Bruce had no business bringing up this sensitive topic. "You don't have to embarrass our guest by asking a question like that," he told Bruce. "I think you are a terrible reporter. It's the way you ask these questions. You start off with a man who is highly respected, asking him a horrible, insubordinate, and just a terrible question."
In Trump's view, reporters who ask unwelcome questions are "insubordinate." If they understood their proper role, he thinks, they would instead be subordinate, avoiding subjects that government officials would rather not discuss.
Trump also implied that Khashoggi, who annoyed MBS with critical commentary in The Washington Post, had it coming. "A lot of people didn't like that gentleman that you're talking about," he said. "Whether you like him or didn't like him, things happened, but [MBS] knew nothing about it, and we can leave it at that."
Even if you join Trump in uncritically accepting the crown prince's denial of responsibility, the fact remains that Khashoggi was a journalist who was murdered because of his journalism. It is hard to imagine a more extreme attack on freedom of the press. Yet Trump sums it up with "things happened" while suggesting that Khashoggi's unpopularity with "a lot of people" is relevant in assessing the gravity of his murder.
Bruce also irked Trump by asking him about the Justice Department's records regarding Jeffrey Epstein, the financier and former Trump friend who committed suicide in 2019 while facing federal sex trafficking charges. Trump, who had adamantly opposed congressional legislation requiring the release of those files, reversed his position this week in response to pressure from his MAGA base, saying he would sign such a bill, which Congress approved on Tuesday night.
In light of Trump's new position, Bruce noted, no such legislation was necessary. "Why wait for Congress to release the Epstein files?" she asked. "Why not just do it now?"
That question also was "insubordinate," Trump seemed to think. "You're a terrible person and a terrible reporter," he said. "I have nothing to do with Jeffrey Epstein. I threw him out of my club [Mar-a-Lago] many years ago because I thought he was a sick pervert. But I guess I turned out to be right."
That account was notably different from Trump's prior explanation of his falling-out with Epstein, which he said Epstein provoked by poaching employees from Mar-a-Lago. The new explanation suggested that Trump suspected "many years ago" that his friend was implicated in sex crimes, which also contradicts what Trump previously said. But instead of picking up on that point, Bruce pressed her original question.
That is when Trump said ABC should lose "the license," by which he presumably meant the broadcast licenses held by network-owned TV stations. He added that Brendan Carr, the Trump-appointed chairman of the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), "should look at that" because "when you're 97 percent negative to Trump, and then Trump wins the election in a landslide, that means obviously your news is not credible."
Trump likes to cite that "97 percent" figure. "I have read someplace that the networks were 97 percent against me, I get 97 percent negative, and yet I won and easily," he told reporters in September. "I would think maybe their license should be taken away."
Trump's estimate is characteristically inflated, but he probably had in mind a 2024 report from the Media Research Center (MRC), which found that 85 percent of Trump coverage on the TV networks' evening news shows was negative prior to the election. More recently, the MRC reported that 92 percent of such coverage was negative during Trump's first 100 days in office.
Since Trump won the 2024 election, he reasons, the overwhelmingly negative network coverage of his campaign "obviously" was "not credible." By the same logic, that coverage would have been credible if Trump had lost the election. Although this is probably not the best way to assess the quality of TV network journalism, the important point is that Trump thinks broadcast licenses should be contingent on his own judgment of whether that journalism is fair and balanced.
When "97 percent of the stories" about him are negative, Trump said in September, "that's no longer free speech." In fact, he claimed, it is "really illegal" when the networks "take a great story" and "make it bad."
How so? "You have a network and you have evening shows, and all they do is hit Trump," the president complained. "They're licensed. They're not allowed to do that."
Trump has been threatening to revoke broadcast licenses in response to unfavorable press coverage for at least eight years. So far, he has not even attempted to deliver on those threats, which would require a cumbersome and time-consuming administrative process, followed by judicial appeals. But unlike Ajit Pai, who ran the FCC during Trump's first term, Carr is sympathetic to the president's view of the obligations attached to broadcast licenses.
In September, when Carr threatened TV stations that carried Jimmy Kimmel's ABC talk show with fines or license revocation, he improbably suggested that the anti-Trump comedian's monologues might violate the FCC's rule against "broadcast news distortion." That eyebrow-raising claim reflected Carr's alarmingly broad understanding of the FCC's mission.
"We have a rule on the book that interprets the 'public interest' standard [and] says news distortion is prohibited," Carr told right-wing podcaster Benny Johnson. "Over the years, the FCC has stepped back from enforcing it, and I don't think it's been to the benefit of anybody." Broadcast licenses entail "an obligation to operate in the public interest," he explained, and "we've been trying to reinvigorate the public interest."
Since Carr agrees with Trump that biased news coverage is inconsistent with "the public interest," he seems intent on enforcing something like the "fairness doctrine," a policy that the FCC abandoned in 1987 after concluding that it was inconsistent with the First Amendment. Whether or not Carr actually follows through on Trump's threats to yank broadcast licenses, an FCC that presumes to investigate broadcasters for journalism that offends the president is a menace to freedom of the press.
