First Amendment

Brendan Carr Says ABC's Refusal To Air a Trump Speech Could Affect Renewal of Its Broadcast Licenses

The FCC chairman thinks the "public interest" standard is a license to interfere with freedom of the press.

Jacob Sullum | 7.23.2026 2:45 PM

Share on FacebookShare on XShare on RedditShare by emailPrint friendly versionCopy page URL Add Reason to Google

Media Contact & Reprint Requests

(Aaron Schwartz/Sipa USA/Newscom/Ken Wolter/Dreamstime)

Last week, President Donald Trump said ABC and NBC should lose their broadcast licenses because they had dissed him by declining to air his speech about election security. On Wednesday, Brendan Carr, the Trump-appointed chairman of the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), suggested he is sympathetic to that view, saying ABC's news-coverage decision will figure in the FCC's ongoing review of the broadcast licenses held by Disney, which owns ABC and its TV stations in eight cities.

Carr's comments reinforce the point that his understanding of the "public interest" that broadcasters are legally obligated to serve is indistinguishable from Trump's personal interests. The idea that the FCC should punish news organizations for exercising their editorial judgment in a way that offends the president is plainly inconsistent with the press freedom guaranteed by the First Amendment. But as Carr sees it, his agency has the authority to restrict that freedom in service of his boss's petty vendettas.

Trump's 24-minute speech, which he delivered from the East Room of the White House on Thursday night, was ostensibly about the need to ensure "fair and honest elections." But before broaching that topic, Trump bragged about his supposed accomplishments for several minutes. And when he got around to discussing election security, he made several dubious statements, including allegations that "members of the deep state" had "worked to actively suppress" information about a "colossal security breach," that they had "blatantly lied" about "the security of our election infrastructure," and that "our elections were left vulnerable to being rigged and stolen."

Although Trump did not explicitly reiterate his long-debunked claim that Joe Biden relied on such chicanery to steal the 2020 presidential election, he described a "plot" to "continue this fraud"—a criminal conspiracy that he said included ABC and NBC. The networks' complicity was clear, he said, from the fact that they did not provide live coverage of his speech "because they know how corrupt our system is, and they don't want to reveal it." He added that "fraud like this should mean a revocation of their licenses."

An FCC chairman who was actually devoted to defending the First Amendment, as Carr claims to be, would have rejected that suggestion out of hand. Although such defiance might seem inconceivable now that Trump has surrounded himself with toadies eager to do his bidding, it happened during his first term, when FCC Chairman Ajit Pai made it clear that he would not act as Trump's hatchet man.

"Network news has become so partisan, distorted and fake that licenses must be challenged and, if appropriate, revoked," Trump declared in October 2017. Pai disagreed in no uncertain terms. "I believe in the First........

© Reason.com