US President Donald Trump was hosted by King Charles at a State Banquet at Windsor Castle yesterday. Photo / Getty Images
United States President Donald Trump said today that regulators should consider revoking the licences of broadcasters who air negative coverage or commentary of him, indicating that his assault on critics’ language is motivated at least in part by personal animus.
Speaking to reporters aboard Air Force One, Trump called the networks “an arm of the Democrat Party” who are out to get him.
“I have read someplace that the networks were 97% against me, I get 97% negative, and yet I won and easily,” Trump said as he returned to Washington following a state visit to Britain.
He added: “I would think maybe their licence should be taken away.”
The comments were a remarkable escalation in a co-ordinated attack by Trump and his top aides, who are using the threat of the power of the US Government to silence criticism or dissent following the assassination of the right-wing activist Charlie Kirk.
In the past week, the White House has moved to target the tax status of liberal groups, monitor online speech, deny visas, and threaten to designate certain groups as domestic terrorists.
The Administration has argued such measures are necessary to crack down on hate speech that could incite violence, even as Democrats and others warn that it amounts to a crackdown on opposing views.
Yesterday, ABC pulled Jimmy Kimmel’s show “indefinitely” after pressure from the Federal Communications Commission chairman, Brendan Carr, over the late-night host’s comments about Kirk.
Trump indicated today that Carr should go even further and scrutinise the broadcast licences of local television stations that run programming from the major networks.
He suggested that both their news coverage and late-night comedy shows were unfairly tilted against him.
“They give me only bad publicity,” he said.
“It will be up to Brendan Carr,” the President said, calling him “a patriot” and “a tough guy”.
A spokesperson for the FCC did not immediately respond to a request for comment about Trump’s remarks.
Earlier in the day, Carr argued in an interview on CNBC that holding a broadcast licence is a privilege. “It comes with an obligation to serve the public interest,” he said.
The Federal Communications Commission can revoke a broadcast licence under a rarely invoked public interest standard.
If regulators were to follow Trump’s lead and pull licences of broadcasters who air critical views about the President, the agency would surely face First Amendment challenges.
Trump and his FCC head have already effectively used the agency’s oversight of licences to wield influence over the networks, which they argue have a liberal bias that does not serve the public.
Anna Gomez, the lone Democrat on the FCC, said the commission “does not have the authority, the ability, or the constitutional right to police content or punish broadcasters for speech the Government dislikes”.
“We cannot allow an inexcusable act of political violence to be twisted into a justification for government censorship and control,” she said in a statement.
The pressure campaign is an about-face for Republicans and for Trump, who swept back into the White House with promises to wipe out so-called “cancel culture” and promised during his inauguration to “stop all government censorship and bring back free speech to America”, as he said in his inaugural speech this year.
In recent days, the President and top Administration officials — including Vice-President JD Vance, Attorney-General Pam Bondi and Stephen Miller, the White House deputy chief of staff — have drastically changed their emphasis.
They have seized on those who have appeared to celebrate Kirk’s death or been critical of his positions as evidence of what they allege is a left-wing network that funds and incites violence.
Trump has blamed what he called the “radical left” for political violence, dismissing concerns about extremists on the right.
Asked today about the state of free speech in America, Trump argued that Kimmel had been “fired because he had bad ratings” and “he said a horrible thing”.
“You could call that free speech or not,” Trump said.
The White House referred questions about Trump targeting broadcasters who allow unflattering coverage or commentary about him to the FCC.
Abigail Jackson, a White House spokeswoman, did respond to questions about Kimmel, saying his suspension had “nothing to do with free speech”.
“A private company deciding not to give someone a TV show, is incomparable to the Biden Administration’s censorship regime where they pressured social media companies to prevent Americans from speaking out with opinions they didn’t like,” she said.
Republicans have accused the Biden Administration of censorship over its efforts to combat what it deemed to be misinformation about the coronavirus vaccine and election fraud.
The Supreme Court, however, last year rejected the Republican-led challenge over the Administration’s contacts with social media companies.
Trump and his conservative allies in recent years have accused the political opposition of perpetuating a “cancel culture” that policed language and suppressed the views of conservative voices online, in US politics and overseas.
Now Democrats are the ones warning about threats to the First Amendment, accusing Trump of infringing on the right to free speech.
A group of congressional Democrats said today that they would introduce legislation to bolster legal protections for people targeted by Trump for speaking freely.
Democratic leaders in the House called for the resignation of Carr for engaging in what they called a “corrupt abuse of power” in pressuring ABC to pull Kimmel’s late-night show from the air.
And former President Barack Obama, who said this week that the nation is in “political crisis”, accused the Trump Administration of hypocrisy.
“After years of complaining about cancel culture, the current Administration has taken it to a new and dangerous level by routinely threatening regulatory action against media companies unless they muzzle or fire reporters and commentators it doesn’t like,” Obama wrote in a post on social media.
He added that this kind of “government coercion” is what the First Amendment was designed to prevent.
Some conservatives have said the Administration’s actions are a long time coming, arguing that Democrats unfairly targeted Republicans when they were in power.
Some on the right expressed concern about the Administration’s tactics.
After Bondi suggested that the Justice Department would target “hate speech” this week, conservative host Tucker Carlson said on his podcast that he hoped the “turmoil we’re seeing in the aftermath” of Kirk’s killing “won’t be leveraged to bring hate speech laws to this country”.
“If that does happen, there is never a more justified moment for civil disobedience than that,” Carlson said.
“If they can tell you what to say, they’re telling you what to think, there is nothing they can’t do to you.”
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
Written by: Zolan Kanno-Youngs
Photographs by: Getty Images
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