Trump Wants ABC’s Broadcast License Revoked. That’s Ironic.
After the ex-president’s terrible debate performance, conservatives claim the network is biased. If anything, it aided their rise.
No one to blame but himself.
Photographer: Hannah Beier/BloombergDonald Trump wants to punish ABC News for his bad debate night.
“I think ABC took a big hit last night,” Trump told Fox & Friends during a phone debrief early Wednesday morning. “To be honest, they are a news organization — they have to be licensed to do it — they ought to take away their license for the way they did that.”
His call for federal censorship of a broadcaster for merely correcting his blatant falsehoods may offer insights into how the budding authoritarian plans to govern if he is allowed to return to the Oval Office. But as a historian of conservative news, I am also struck by what this episode reveals about the distorted memories of Trump and his supporters — regarding their movement’s relationship to both the Federal Communications Commission and to ABC.
First, technically, broadcast networks aren’t subjected to FCC licensure — though their affiliate stations are. Furthermore, there is no current regulation that authorizes the FCC to punish broadcasters for biased news or commentary. Perhaps Trump is misremembering the “Fairness Doctrine,” a mid-20th century policy that required broadcasters to provide balanced coverage of issues of public controversy. But that regulation was only rarely and often begrudgingly enforced against the networks (it was mostly used against smaller conservative broadcasters, actually), and it was abolished by the Reagan administration in 1987.