Trump’s growing threats to strip broadcast licenses send chills across industry

New York (CNN) — Broadcast television licensing is not ordinarily a hot topic during a presidential election. But Donald Trump’s threats are not ordinary, either.

In the past two years, Trump has called for every major American TV news network to be punished, according to a CNN review of his speeches and social media posts.

He has imprecisely but repeatedly invoked the government’s licensing of broadcast TV airwaves and has said on at least 15 occasions that certain licenses should be revoked. His anti-broadcasting broadsides – against CBS, ABC, NBC, and even Fox – are almost always in reaction to interview questions he dislikes or programming he detests.

Trump’s threats against CBS have been particularly intense in recent weeks. He has railed against “60 Minutes” for editing the newsmagazine’s interview with Vice President Kamala Harris. The venerable program said Sunday that his claims are false, but on Monday he continued to bring it up on the campaign trail, and his legal team sent a threatening letter to CBS.

“It’s so bad they should lose their license, and they should take ’60 Minutes’ off the air,” Trump told right-wing podcaster Dan Bongino last week.

National networks like CBS are not licensed, but local stations are. (And the parent company of CBS, Paramount Global, owns some local stations.) The licensing agency is the government’s Federal Communications Commission, which grants eight-year license terms, and hasn’t denied any license renewal in decades. The process “is so time consuming that no license renewal could be denied before the end of a hypothetical second Trump term,” public interest lawyer Andrew Jay Schwartzman told CNN.

Still, there is a conceivable chilling effect. Trump’s threats have grown so insistent that some TV industry executives have speculated that they could be vulnerable to some sort of retaliation if Trump returns to power.

In response to CNN’s request for comment, the National Association of Broadcasters, the trade association for American TV and radio operators, said Trump’s rhetoric undermines First Amendment freedoms. NAB CEO Curtis LeGeyt did not call out the former president by name, however.

“From our country’s beginning, the right of the press to challenge the government, root out corruption and speak freely without fear of recrimination has been central to our democracy,” LeGeyt said in a statement. “Times may have changed, but that principle – enshrined in the First Amendment – has not. The threat from any politician to revoke a broadcast license simply because they disagree with the station’s content undermines this basic freedom.”

Many of Trump’s threats conflate national networks and local stations. CBS is his current target, but last month he repeatedly accused ABC of wrongdoing after he was fact checked during a presidential debate with Harris, floating “they ought to take away their license” as punishment. Earlier in the year, he said of NBC and CNN, “they should have their licenses or whatever they have taken away.”

CNN, which is distributed via cable, satellite and streaming services, is not licensed by the FCC like broadcast stations.

Trump also mixed-up broadcast and cable while attacking a different cable news network, MSNBC, in November 2023. He wrote on Truth Social that MSNBC “uses FREE government approved airwaves… for purposes of ELECTION INTERFERENCE.” But MSNBC does not use those airwaves; only NBC’s local stations do.

After ABC hosted a presidential debate in September, Trump claimed “people are saying that Comrade Kamala Harris had the questions from Fake News ABC.” That would be a profound ethical lapse, and there was no evidence that it happened; but Harris was widely thought to have won the debate, and Trump lashed out on Truth Social. He referenced Disney Entertainment co-chairman Dana Walden’s close relationship with Harris and said, “if she did give the questions to Kamala, ABC’s license should be TERMINATED.”

Two sources with knowledge of the matter said Walden shrugged off Trump’s missive, but others at ABC found it frustrating and perplexing. “He was our president and he doesn’t even know how licenses work,” one of the sources said.

As president, Trump also said that TV licenses “must be challenged and, if appropriate, revoked,” but nothing came of it. The FCC chairman at the time, Ajit Pai, responded by saying the agency “does not have the authority to revoke a license of a broadcast station based on the content of a particular newscast.”

Pai, now in private practice, declined to comment on Trump’s recent threats. But one current FCC commissioner, Nathan Simington, a Republican appointed by Trump in 2020, has asserted that the agency should look into alleged “news distortion” by “60 Minutes.”

However, the agency is currently controlled by Democrats. FCC chair Jessica Rosenworcel has repeatedly spoken out against Trump’s statements.

“While the FCC has authority to provide licenses for television and radio, it is pretty fundamental that we do not take them away because a political candidate disagrees with or dislikes any kind of content or coverage,” Rosenworcel told NPR this week.

And Trump’s complaints are clearly about content. In January 2023, he wrote on Truth Social that “FAKE NEWS SHOULD NOT BE ALLOWED TO ‘STINK UP’ OUR AIRWAVES!” In October 2023, he asked why CBS should “get free public airwaves” for a “highly partisan” episode of “60 Minutes.” In July of this year, he scolded Fox News, writing, “STOP PUTTING ON THE ENEMY!”

Trump has also vowed to place the FCC “back under presidential authority” — but any attempt to do so would stir legal battles. The agency currently operates independently, with both Democratic and Republican commissioners, and members of both parties have historically supported existing license-holders. “Decades of regulatory capture has made case law that strongly favors incumbent licensees,” Schwartzman said. Plus, “the more cynical among us would observe that going after broadcasters is not a good thing to have on one’s resume for post-FCC employment.”

Even so, First Amendment attorney Ted Boutrous, who represented CNN in a 2018 lawsuit against Trump when correspondent Jim Acosta’s press pass was revoked, said that Trump’s comments should be taken seriously.

“At this point, I wouldn’t put anything past Donald Trump and his remaining hard-core loyalists,” Boutrous said. “He tried to strip the White House press passes from reporters he didn’t like last time around and tried to corrupt the Voice of America to be his own personal global megaphone.”

“If he can get a majority of his appointees to control the FCC,” Boutrous continued, “there is no telling what grievous injury he and they could do to freedom of the press and the ability of the networks and their affiliates to disseminate the news and actual facts to the American people.”

Rosenworcel – whose term at the FCC ends next June – sounded a similar note in her interview with NPR this week. Speaking of Trump’s licensing threats, she said, “We can’t let this be normal. If you want to maintain a constitutional democracy, you have to speak up for it.”

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