President Donald Trump has called for the broadcast licences of NBC and ABC to be revoked after the networks declined to air his primetime address on their main channels. In a Thursday night speech on election interference, Trump accused the outlets of being 'part of a plot' and claimed that such 'fraud' should lead to licence revocation.
ABC and NBC covered the address on their streaming platforms, ABC News Live and NBC News NOW, and aired summaries afterwards. However, Trump rebuked them for not broadcasting it on their primary channels. White House communications director Steven Cheung echoed the criticism, posting on X: 'Cowards. NBC and ABC don’t want you to hear the truth.'
Fox News aired the speech live in full, while CNN opted not to, with anchor Kaitlan Collins explaining the network would monitor and fact-check the president’s remarks due to his history of making false statements about elections. The 23-minute address saw Trump allege, without providing evidence, that Chinese efforts interfered in the 2020 election and that national security officials had hidden information.
Trump also claimed that American elections are vulnerable to hacking and foreign interference, and accused China of carrying out 'the largest compromise of election data in history' by acquiring commercially available election data. Towards the end of the speech, he renewed his attacks on the media, asserting that ABC and NBC did not want to reveal the 'corrupt' system.
This is not the first time Trump has threatened broadcasters’ licences. Since returning to the White House, he has repeatedly targeted news outlets. Earlier this year, Federal Communications Commission chairman Brendan Carr, a Trump appointee, also threatened licences amid the president’s complaints about media coverage of the Iran war. Carr is currently in a dispute with ABC over whether its talk show The View qualifies as a 'bona fide news programme' and has argued it violated the equal time rule.
