Trump Whines, Again Threatens NBC, ABC Broadcast Licenses For Doing Journalism
from the the-idiot-king-is-crying-again dept
With Fox being Fox, and CBS having just paid Trump a $16 million bribe and now owned by Trump’s friends the Ellison family, there’s little worry that either network will be doing serious journalism anytime soon. So Trump, over the weekend, redirected his ire at the remaining two “big four” broadcasters, ABC and NBC, for the sin of doing journalism semi-critical of our idiot king. Of course, with a few months time, if the memory of the bribe fades, whose to say Trump won’t retarget CBS as well. After all, ABC already paid a similar tribute to Trump, but that was already nine months ago.
Remember: giving in to the bully doesn’t make him go away. It just makes him realize you’re an easy mark.
In a rant at his propaganda social media platform Truth Social, Trump lied, claiming that both ABC and NBC were unfair to Conservatives and should have their broadcast licenses pulled:
What upset our oafish mad king? Apparently it was a recent study by the right wing “watchdog” group Media Research Center (MRC) that “studied” ABC’s “World News Tonight,” “NBC Nightly News” and “CBS Evening News” from Jan. 20 through April 9. The study found that 92 percent of the 899 stories about Trump were generally negative. A lot of the coverage were of Trump’s ridiculous, harmful, and unpopular tariffs.
Trump also appears to have been upset because ABC interviewed Chris Christie, which itself can barely be construed as any sort of useful or interesting journalism. So to be clear: Trump wasn’t upset by journalism, he was upset by a right wing activist group misrepresenting journalism, and a largely irrelevant former Republican Governor of New Jersey who probably shouldn’t be on TV in the first place.
Like most things, Trump doesn’t understand how anything he works. He doesn’t understand the First Amendment. He doesn’t really understand that it’s the local affiliates of these major networks that have local broadcast licenses. Or that randomly revoking them isn’t something that’s particularly legal or easy, even with a sycophantic stooge and anti-free-speech zealot in charge of his FCC.
That’s not to say the threats are empty. Former FCC boss Tom Wheeler wrote a piece last year exploring what Trump can and can’t actually do.
As we just saw with CBS, Trump’s bobble-headed regulators have had success leveraging the merger approval process to bully companies like CBS into feckless compliance if they’re mean to the president or aren’t suitably racist and sexist enough for his liking. There are also some untapped possibilities like leveraging emergency war powers embedded in the Communications Act to attack journalism and free speech.
Worried that they might give the full-diapered baby king a sad, media companies have been quick to soften their coverage of Trump in exchange for tax breaks and regulatory favors, highlighting, repeatedly, the weakness of the modern fourth estate in the online, ad-based, infotainment news era. Many of these networks rushed to hire more right wingers to appease Trump before he’d even won re-election.
U.S. corporate news is a feckless mess that’s generally been shifting its editorial Overton window rightward for decades to appease an increasingly radical U.S. right wing. It’s hard to imagine how authoritarians would respond if the U.S. news had been vibrant and fearless in the first place. That said, if U.S. media was healthy, it’s very possible authoritarians would have never come to power in the first place.
But authoritarian disdain for factual reality and an informed electorate is bottomless all the same, and their endless bullying of U.S. media giants (often for nonexistent “liberal bias”) has been very clearly and disastrously successful.
Filed Under: 1st amendment, bias, broadcast, censorship, donald trump, free speech, journalism, licenses, media
Companies: abc, nbc
Comments on “Trump Whines, Again Threatens NBC, ABC Broadcast Licenses For Doing Journalism”
America is going to see either ICE or the proud boys start smashing up newsrooms, servers and printing presses before the end of the Trump term.
Right-wing cancel culture
“Conservative” snowflakes are cancel-culture on steroids. We’re not long until a MAGA Kristallnacht occurs.
It’s a weird problem, because the answer is not so simple as “do better”. American journalism, for better or for worse, exists to sell viewership. Whether it’s ad-supported broadcast or subscription-based the money is being made by getting eyeballs to stare at something. It doesn’t matter if it’s true. It doesn’t matter if it’s high quality. As long as people are looking, the money is rolling in, and all is well.
American journalism has a problem with its viewers though, particularly the ones who might be described as “conservative”. Sure, it’s a cult, but that cult is growing and cults still have eyeballs. I think a lot of media companies realized in the wake of 2016 and definitely after 2024 that the cult isn’t watching their material (not even hate watching it). That threatens the bottom line.
So how do you get cultists to watch something? You send them more cult messaging, i.e. hire a few crackpot conspiracy types to invent some “news” that will validate their existing beliefs. You definitely don’t feed them more real world information they don’t want to see.
That old adage that more speech is the proper counter to bad speech only works if people listen to the extra speech. If they lock themselves in a bubble where the only thing they can hear is the bad speech, more speech literally does nothing. It actually may even be counterproductive since it just reinforces their desire to stay in the bubble.
ABC and NBC can not lose their broadcast licenses because they don’t HAVE broadcast licenses. Individual stations are licensed, networks are not.