Trump says ABC, NBC licenses should be revoked over refusal to air speech on election integrity

President Donald Trump lit into ABC and NBC for refusing to interrupt regularly scheduled programming to air his speech Thursday night on election integrity.

Trump, who has for years feuded with the country’s most prominent media companies, claimed without evidence that ABC and NBC declined to cover the speech because they were complicit in a larger fraud.

“They and others in the media are part of a plot,” Trump said. “They want to continue this fraud for whatever reason. They want to keep it going. They want to protect the radical left.”

ABC and NBC did not specify why they declined to air the speech, but networks are often loath to grant time to presidents for overtly political purposes. Fellow broadcast network Fox took the speech live while CBS preempted programming for a special report, in which it aired part of the speech and explained Trump’s long history of falsehoods on the topic of election security.

Trump asserted that ABC and NBC should lose their government-issued broadcast licenses, something that he’s repeatedly suggested and something that his Federal Communications Commission chairman, Brendan Carr, has taken unprecedented steps to do, particularly with ABC, in recent months.

Carr called in ABC’s eight broadcast station licenses for early review over an investigation into the network’s diversity practices. He has also probed whether daytime talk show “The View” has violated the FCC’s equal time rule; ABC maintains it’s long been exempt.

“They can’t have a great country. And that’s true. You can’t have a great country without free and fair elections,” Trump said. “Fraud like this should mean a revocation of their licenses. They use our public multi-billion-dollar-in-value airways for absolutely no money. They pay nothing. All we want is honesty in our elections and honesty and reporting. They pay nothing for multibillion dollar assets.”

ABC and NBC did not respond immediately for a request for comment; nor did the FCC.

The White House requested air time from the four major broadcast networks this week, according to two people who spoke on condition of anonymity to speak about private deliberations. But the networks did not announce their plans until hours before the speech.

ABC carried the remarks lives on its streaming service, ABC News Live, and on its radio network. NBC carried the speech live on streaming service NBC News NOW and aired a special report on its network airwaves after it concluded.

White House officials began attacking the two networks even before Trump spoke. “Cowards. NBC and ABC don’t want you to hear the truth,” White House communications director Steven Cheung wrote on X. “All they want to do is hide the facts from YOU. Tune in @WhiteHouse at 9:00pm EDT, where we always get bigger ratings than any of the networks.”

The cable networks — namely, Fox News, MS NOW and CNN — were split in their treatment. Fox News aired the speech live, while CNN did not. MS NOW began to air it, but the network interrupted it for fact-checks.

“We’ll be monitoring what the president says tonight, as we always do, but aren’t taking it live, given the president has a well-documented history of saying blatantly false things about elections,” CNN’s Kaitlan Collins said on air.

Fox News, which in 2023 settled a defamation lawsuit with voting machine company Dominion for $787.5 million, made clear that it did not endorse the president’s statements.

“Now you just heard him make those claims that electronic voting machines are vulnerable and easily compromised,” anchor Bret Baier said. “Fox News has not seen that evidence directly yet and is not in a position to evaluate the accuracy of the president’s statements at this time, but the president did say the documents will all be posted on the website, WhiteHouse.gov tonight.”