President Donald Trump suggested Thursday that networks providing negative coverage of him should be stripped of their broadcast licenses.
“They’re 97% against, they give me wholly bad publicity … I mean, they’re getting a license, I would think maybe their license should be taken away,” Trump told reporters aboard Air Force One on his way back to the U.S. from Great Britain, according to a post on X by CNN reporter Alayna Treene.
Treene followed up with Trump saying: “When you have a network and you have evening shows and all they do is hit Trump … I guess they haven’t had a conservative on in years. They’re not allowed to do that.”
Trump’s comment came a day after ABC suspended “Jimmy Kimmel Live!” after the host said Trump supporters tried to characterize the suspected killer of conservative leader Charlie Kirk as “anything other than one of them and doing everything they can to score political points from it.”
Nexstar Media Group, which owns a large number of ABC affiliates, first announced it would pull the show from its stations. ABC then suspended it across its network.
This is not the first time Trump has lashed out at networks for negative coverage. In August, he wrote on Truth Social that ABC and NBC are “fake news” and “two of the worst and most biased networks in history, give me 97% bad stories.”
“If that is the case, they are simply an arm of the Democrat Party and should, according to many, have their licenses revoked by the FCC,” he wrote. “I would be totally in favor of that because they are so biased and untruthful, an actual threat to our Democracy!!! MAGA.”
Although Trump has been frustrated with negative coverage, the Federal Communications Commission does not license networks such as ABC and NBC, only their local broadcast stations. That means the FCC cannot revoke a network’s license outright. The agency does, however, hold leverage through its authority to review and renew station licenses, enforce ownership limits and apply content rules such as indecency standards, which can put indirect pressure on affiliates and, by extension, the networks supplying their programming.
Newsmax reached out to the FCC for comment.
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