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President Donald Trump called for NBC and ABC to have their broadcast licenses revoked for not airing his primetime address about “election interference,” accusing the networks of being “part of a plot.”
ABC and NBC covered the Thursday night speech on their online streaming platforms, with both networks airing special reports summarizing Trump’s remarks once the president concluded. But he still rebuked the outlets for not airing it on their primary channels.
“In a rare move, NBC and ABC fake news have both said that they would not cover this speech,” Trump said in his evening address. “They and others in the media are part of a plot. They want to continue this fraud for whatever reason…Fraud like this should mean a revocation of their licenses.”
White House communications director Steven Cheung also joined in the attack. “Cowards. NBC and ABC don’t want you to hear the truth,” he said in a post on X. “All they want to do is hide the facts from YOU.”
NBC News NOW, the network’s streaming service, carried the speech live, as did ABC on its ABC News Live platform.
Fox News aired the full speech live but CNN did not, with Kaitlan Collins explaining to viewers that the network would be “monitoring” what the president said in order to fact check the address.
“We’ll be monitoring what the president says tonight, as we always do, but aren’t taking it live, given the president has a well-documented history of saying blatantly false things about elections,” Collins said.
In the rare primetime address, which lasted approximately 23 minutes, Trump accused unnamed national security officials of hiding information about the security of America’s elections and alleged there were Chinese efforts to interfere in the 2020 election, which he lost.
Citing no hard evidence, the president claimed American elections are vulnerable “to hacking, exploitation, and foreign interference” and accused the People’s Republic of China of carrying out “the largest compromise of election data in history” by acquiring election data — much of which is commercially available for purchase by political campaigns and other interested parties.
Toward the end of the speech, Trump launched into a familiar attack against the networks and the media.
“They knew what it was about, because of the fact that they don't like the topic, because they know how corrupt our system is and they don't want to reveal it,” the president said of ABC and NBC.
Trump has repeatedly railed against news outlets over stories he doesn’t like and threatened to revoke broadcasters’ licenses for coverage he deems unfair since returning to the White House.
Earlier this year, Federal Communications Commission chairman, Trump appointee Brendan Carr, threatened broadcasters’ licenses amid the president’s complaints about media coverage of the Iran war.
Carr is also in the middle of a dispute with ABC about its popular talk show The View over whether the program qualifies as a “bona fide news program.” Carr has argued that the program has violated the commission’s equal time rule, which ABC maintained it has long been exempt from.