Last night, President Trump gave a speech, mostly on voter fraud and elections, that many television networks, including ABC and NBC, chose not to air.
As a result, President Trump accused ABC and NBC in his speech of being part of the fraud, a fraud that “should mean a revocation of their licenses; they use our public, multi-billion dollar in value airwaves for absolutely no money; they pay nothing.”
Cato scholars have been clear that the government does not and should not have the power to censor or compel media organizations in their reporting or programming. While a presidential address is often newsworthy, media organizations make their own editorial decisions that are protected by the First Amendment. In 2022, most networks, including ABC and NBC, refused to cover a prime-time address by President Biden in which he described Republicans as threats to democracy. Similar to last night’s speech, they did so because they felt the topic was political in nature and right before a midterm election. Just as no government has the right to demand what newspapers or cable news covers or does not cover, no government should have that power over broadcast media.
President Trump and his FCC chairman, Brendan Carr, however, have been consistently pressuring broadcasters to silence those critical of the president and his allies. Examples include:- efforts to fire Jimmy Kimmel following the murder of Charlie Kirk,
- threatening broadcasters for unfavorable reporting about the conflict in Iran,
- changing the equal time rule to punish ABC’s The View and causing CBS’s Stephen Colbert to publish an interview with James Talarico, the Democratic candidate for Senate in Texas, on YouTube rather than broadcasting it live, and
- calling ABC’s broadcast licenses in for early review following another disliked Jimmy Kimmel segment.
Unfortunately, Congress and past Supreme Court precedents have given significant power to the FCC, thus empowering it to meddle in the programming choices of broadcasters. This has been used by Republicans and Democrats to silence their political opponents. But just because the courts or policymakers have allowed censorship to occur in the past does not make it right now.
If anything, the continuing abuse of the FCC’s powers under the Trump administration indicates that significant policy and legal changes are needed to curtail such censorial power. These range from legal battles to overturn precedents that empowered FCC regulation of speech, like Red Lion Broadcasting Co. v. FCC; getting rid of the most obvious tools of censorship, like the news distortion rule; or rethinking the public interest standard that currently governs the FCC’s approach to managing spectrum.
A final note worth mentioning is that President Trump attacks NBC and ABC for using the public airwaves for free. In one sense, he is right. Our policymakers have decided that most of the broadcast spectrum should be doled out by the FCC. But it doesn’t have to be this way. The US could take a fundamentally different approach that treats the spectrum more as a property right. Broadcasters and other potential users of the radio spectrum could buy and trade rights to use specific bandwidths. Indeed, this would completely solve the problem of the FCC interfering in broadcasters’ editorial decisions, since the FCC would no longer have any control over broadcast licenses.
President Trump is allowed to be upset that media outlets are doing things that he doesn’t like. But it is an entirely different thing to turn that disagreement into a call to silence and censor the press. This attack sets a dangerous precedent, making the need for FCC reform all the more urgent.
