Let us begin with the sitcoms.
On Thursday evening, the President of the United States requested that the major broadcast networks clear their primetime schedules so that he could address the nation about a matter of grave national importance, that matter being a six-year-old election he lost and continues to describe as a crime scene. Two of those networks, ABC and NBC, considered the request and decided, in the manner of adults running a business, that they would instead air the programs they had already scheduled, and put his speech on their streaming platforms, where anyone who wished to watch it could do so with the press of a button.
The President responded to this editorial decision by demanding that the federal government revoke their broadcast licenses.
“Fraud like this should mean a revocation of their licenses,” he said, live, from the East Room, in the middle of a speech about election integrity, having just characterized the decision not to preempt a sitcom as a species of fraud. He then added, and this is the part that lingers, “They use our public multi-billion-dollar-in-value airways for absolutely no money. They pay nothing.”
Set aside for a moment the small matter of the First Amendment, which we will return to, and sit with the sentence. The man is aggrieved that television networks are not paying him personally for the air. He has looked at the electromagnetic spectrum, an intangible property of the physical universe that has existed since roughly the Big Bang, and concluded that he is being cheated on the rent.
The Licenses He Wants Revoked Do Not Exist
Here is where the evening achieves a kind of comic perfection that no satirist could improve upon.
ABC and NBC do not have broadcast licenses. They have never had broadcast licenses. Broadcast licenses are issued by the Federal Communications Commission to local affiliate stations, most of which are owned by companies that are not the networks, and it is those stations, in Toledo and Sacramento and Tampa, that hold the licenses and broadcast over the public airwaves. The networks make the shows. The affiliates air them. This is not obscure regulatory arcana. This is the basic architecture of American television, and it has worked this way since before the president was born.
He has therefore demanded the confiscation of a thing from two entities that do not possess it. It is the regulatory equivalent of threatening to repossess a man’s yacht because he insulted you, when the man does not own a yacht, has never owned a yacht, and lives in Ohio. The threat is not merely lawless. It is aimed at empty air, which, given the subject matter, is at least thematically consistent.
He has been making this threat since his first term. Nobody has explained it to him. Or somebody has explained it to him, repeatedly, in small words, and he has received the information in the way he receives all information he did not request, which is by declining to.
The Plot
The networks’ decision, he explained, was not an editorial judgment. It was a conspiracy.
“They and others in the media are part of a plot,” he said. “They want to continue this fraud for whatever reason. They want to keep it going. They want to protect the radical left.”
The plot, in this telling, is that two corporations wanted to broadcast their regularly scheduled Thursday programming, an act of subterfuge so brazen that it also happens to be what they do every other Thursday of the year. Networks have declined to carry presidential addresses for decades. They declined to carry Biden’s 2022 democracy speech. They have declined to carry Obama. The refusal to preempt is one of the most ordinary editorial decisions in American broadcasting, and the president has identified it as the visible tip of a coordinated criminal enterprise to conceal Chinese election fraud, which, we should note, his own declassified documents say did not occur.
The single Democratic commissioner on the FCC, Anna Gomez, responded with the exasperated clarity of a woman who has explained this before: it is ridiculous to call for broadcasters to lose their licenses for making the same editorial decisions they have made under presidents of both parties, those decisions are protected by the First Amendment, the FCC has no authority to punish a station for refusing to air a blatantly political speech, and the whole thing is a naked attempt to bully broadcasters.
The Reason They Were Nervous
And here is the detail that turns the whole episode from farce into something with actual teeth, because it reveals that the networks were not plotting. They were doing math.
The reason broadcasters have grown skittish about airing unverified claims regarding the 2020 election is that Fox News paid seven hundred and eighty-seven and a half million dollars to settle a defamation suit for doing exactly that. That is the going rate. That is the number that sits in the mind of every general counsel at every network in America when a president announces he would like to go on live television and make claims about stolen elections and voting machines.
So when ABC and NBC declined to hand him an unmediated live feed, they were not protecting the radical left. They were protecting their shareholders from a nine-figure judgment, a concern the president might understand if he had ever in his life absorbed the concept that words carry consequences, which the eighty-three million dollars he has personally been ordered to pay for defaming a woman he was found liable for sexually abusing suggests he has not.
Even Fox, which carried the speech in full, felt compelled to break in with a disclaimer, its anchor noting that the network had not seen the evidence for the president’s claims about voting machines and was not in a position to evaluate their accuracy. CBS aired it and then cut away with five minutes still remaining, which is the broadcasting equivalent of checking your watch at a dinner party and discovering you have somewhere else to be.
The president’s most loyal network aired his speech while holding it at arm’s length like a diaper.
What It Actually Is
Strip away the comedy, and what remains is not funny at all.
The President of the United States, on live television, threatened two news organizations with government destruction because they exercised editorial judgment he disliked. He did this while the FCC, which he controls, has already opened probes into broadcasters over their practices. The threat is empty in its specifics, aimed at licenses that do not exist at companies that do not hold them, but it is not empty in its effect, because the affiliates do hold licenses, and the FCC does have leverage, and every station manager in America heard the message underneath the incompetent delivery.
That message is: carry me, or I will come for your business. It does not matter that he has the mechanism wrong. Authoritarianism does not require competence, only willingness, and a man who does not understand how broadcast licensing works but is perfectly willing to weaponize it is not less dangerous than one who does. He is arguably more so, because he will not be constrained by an understanding of what he is legally permitted to do.
Bernie Sanders called it what it was: in true authoritarian fashion, threatening to revoke licenses because networks would not cover his speech. Insane.
But the part that will stay with me is not the threat. It is the rent. It is a man standing in the East Room of the White House, in a room that has hosted Churchill and Mandela, complaining that the television networks are using the sky for free.
The airwaves, he would like you to know, are worth billions.
And they are not paying him a dime.
This lunatic is insufferable. When will he leave the building ???
I demand a president who isn't such a whiny little bitch! 🐷🖕