Brendan Carr, current chairman for the FCC, said that ABC’s recent decision to not carry President Trump’s live speech on election security will factor into its investigation regarding its broadcast license.
President Trump delivered a speech about election security last week in which he claimed that China “had illegally accessed millions of voter files as part of a broader effort to manipulate U.S. elections in 2018 and 2020,” per Variety. During the speech, Trump singled out both ABC and NBC for not carrying the speech live.
“In a rare move, NBC and ABC fake news have both said that they would not cover this speech. They knew what it was about,” Trump said. “Fraud like this should mean a revocation of their licenses.”
Speaking at a press conference on Wednesday, Brendan Carr said that FCC opened a review regarding ABC’s broadcast license to evaluate “whether they’ve been operating in the public interest,” adding that he was “sure that there are going to be points raised in that proceeding” about the decision to not air Trump’s speech.
“I think that when you have the president of the United States standing inside the White House delivering an important speech, I think that’s something that broadcasters should be carrying,” Carr said, adding that the FCC will hold all broadasters to that standars.
FCC commissioner Anna Gomez, appointed by Joe Biden, disagreed with Carr, arguing that broadcasters should not be told how to make editorial decisions.
“I always have to be grounded in the fact that it is not for the FCC to tell broadcasters how to make their editorial decisions or what content to place on their networks or their local broadcast stations,” Gomez said. “They have a First Amendment right to make those decisions. And in fact, it’s censorship one way or another. If we tell them they can’t broadcast something, that’s censorship, and it’s compelled speech if we tell them they have to do so. So there is nothing here that violates any rule or statutory provision with regard to these networks.”
“I continue to say that this vague public interest standard is being used just to punish speech that this administration doesn’t like and to reward speech that it does like. That’s inappropriate, and it’s contrary to the law and to the Constitution,” Gomez added.
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