Trump Threatens To Strip Broadcast Licenses

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 podcaster Dan Bongino last week.

National networks like CBS are not licensed, but local stations are. 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 wrote in the 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,” he wrote.