Are TV broadcasters obligated to carry the U.S. president’s comments live on their government-licensed airwaves? The current head of the FCC indicated that he believes they are.
Brendan Carr, the Trump-appointed chairman of the FCC, said Wednesday that the agency will consider ABC‘s decision to not carry a live broadcast President Donald Trump‘s July 16 speech about U.S. election security as part of its early review of licenses to eight ABC-owned stations.
In Trump’s speech last Thursday, the president alleged U.S. elections had been “rigged and stolen.” He claimed China had illegally accessed millions of voter files as part of a broader effort to manipulate U.S. elections in 2018 and 2020. During the speech Trump called out ABC and NBC for opting to not carry his remarks live — and said because of that, they should lose their broadcast TV licenses. It’s a threat he has made numerous times in the past in various contexts. “In a rare move, NBC and ABC fake news have both said that they would not cover this speech. They knew what it was about,” Trump said, as reported by Politico. “Fraud like this should mean a revocation of their licenses.”
At a press conference Wednesday, Carr noted that the FCC has an open proceeding on the early review of ABC’s station licenses to evaluate “whether they’ve been operating in the public interest,” and “I’m sure that there are going to be points raised in that proceeding” about Disney/ABC’s decision to not air Trump’s speech.
“I think that when you have the president of the United States standing inside the White House delivering an important speech, I think that’s something that broadcasters should be carrying,” Carr said. The FCC chairman added that “we’re going to hold all broadcasters” accountable to that same public-interest standard.
ABC declined to comment.
There is a long-established precedent for broadcast TV networks to not air speeches of U.S. presidents live at their discretion. At the FCC press conference, Anna Gomez, the agency’s only Democratic commissioner, pushed back on Carr’s assertion that broadcasters are compelled to carry a president’s speech.
“I always have to be grounded in the fact that it is not for the FCC to tell broadcasters how to make their editorial decisions or what content to place on their networks or their local broadcast stations,” Gomez said. “They have a First Amendment right to make those decisions. And in fact, it’s censorship one way or another. If we tell them they can’t broadcast something, that’s censorship, and it’s compelled speech if we tell them they have to do so. So there is nothing here that violates any rule or statutory provision with regard to these networks.”
Gomez added, “I continue to say that this vague public interest standard is being used just to punish speech that this administration doesn’t like and to reward speech that it does like. That’s inappropriate, and it’s contrary to the law and to the Constitution.”
In April, the FCC’s Media Bureau issued an unprecedented order forcing ABC to reapply for spectrum licenses for its eight owned-and-operated stations on an accelerated schedule. The move came just days after Trump called for Jimmy Kimmel to be fired over a joke the late-night host made about First Lady Melania Trump. The FCC said the early ABC license review is pursuant to the agency’s investigation into Disney and ABC’s potential violations of discrimination rules via the media conglomerate’s diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) practices.
Disney subsequently submitted license-renewal applications for the eight ABC stations, which the company said it did “under protest in response to an unlawful, arbitrary, and unconstitutional order.”
Last month, Disney launched a campaign across its stations urging viewers to share comments about the FCC’s proceeding with the agency.
Also at Wednesday’s press conference, Carr also spoke about the FCC’s planned vote on eliminating the 39% TV station national ownership cap, saying it would allow local stations to “compete on a more level playing field” with national programmers with the additional benefit of “bringing back some of the balance to the broadcast airwaves.”
