President Donald Trump has threatened to shut down NBC and other American networks, saying that they peddle fake news.
"With all of the Fake News coming out of NBC and the Networks, at what point is it appropriate to challenge their License? Bad for country!" Mr Trump wrote in a tweet.
With all of the Fake News coming out of NBC and the Networks, at what point is it appropriate to challenge their License? Bad for country!— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) October 11, 2017
Trump's tweet came in response to a story written by NBC, which said that Mr Trump had sought to increase America's nuclear arsenal tenfold after taking a look at a briefing slide that showed stead reduction of the US nuclear arsenal since the 1960s. The story cited three officials who were reportedly in the room when Mr Trump made the comments.
Fake @NBCNews made up a story that I wanted a "tenfold" increase in our U.S. nuclear arsenal. Pure fiction, made up to demean. NBC = CNN!— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) October 11, 2017
The President has regularly targeted news networks critical of him since January, when he gave a press conference as President-elect and shouted down a CNN reporter as "fake news". The term - which Mr Trump says he invented but had been used frequently before to describe the proliferation of stories written by anonymous bloggers to spread lies during the 2016 election - has since become one of his go-to insults when the media publishes critical coverage of the Trump administration.
According to The Independent, it isn't clear that Mr Trump would be able to easily revoke broadcast licenses for any stations owned by the major networks simply because he disagrees with the content they air, however.
Neither NBC or ABC released statement following the tweet, but others in government stepped in to comment on the issue. Democratic Senator Ed markey wrote to FCC chairman Ajit Pai Wednesday, urging him to resist requests from the President to revoke licenses because of coverage.
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