Trump Demands ABC and NBC Lose Their Broadcast Licenses After They Skip His Election Speech
The president called the networks' decision not to carry his primetime address an act of "fraud" that "should mean a revocation of their licenses." Only Fox and CBS aired it — and both attached disclaimers.
President Donald Trump called Friday for the federal government to strip ABC and NBC of their broadcast licenses, retaliating against the two networks for declining to carry his primetime address on election security live the night before.
Trump accused the networks of participating in "a plot" to "continue this fraud…keep it going" and to "protect the radical left." Their refusal to air the speech, he said, amounted to "fraud" that "should mean a revocation of their licenses." He also complained that broadcasters use "our public multi-billion dollar in value airways for absolutely no money."
The Thursday night address, delivered from the White House, drew on documents Trump's aides had published online hours earlier. In it, he accused China of illegally accessing American voter data and repeated his long-running assertion that the 2020 election, which he lost by roughly seven million votes, was rigged and stolen. Trump's own former director of national intelligence, John Ratcliffe, concluded that China ultimately chose not to interfere in that election and did not change any votes or otherwise alter the outcome. Numerous federal and state investigations, recounts and audits have found no evidence of fraud on a scale capable of changing a presidential result.
Only two of the major broadcasters preempted their scheduled programming. Fox News carried the address in full but told viewers it had "not seen the evidence" supporting Trump's claims about voting machine vulnerabilities. CBS, now led by Trump supporter David Ellison, aired most of the speech with on-air disclaimers noting the president had previously made false statements about losing in 2020; anchor Tony Dokoupil handled the network's coverage. ABC, NBC and CNN all kept their regular schedules on linear television, though ABC and NBC streamed the speech on their digital channels.
The threat lands on networks already under sustained regulatory pressure. In April, the Federal Communications Commission ordered ABC to file early renewal applications for the licenses of its eight owned-and-operated stations — a rare step that exposes those licenses to outside challenges while the agency weighs whether the stations have served the "public interest." The National Association of Broadcasters called the move nearly unprecedented. FCC Chairman Brendan Carr, a Trump appointee who has publicly echoed the president's criticism of network coverage, has denied that White House pressure shaped the review.
Trump has reached for the same threat repeatedly. In a 2025 post on Truth Social, he singled out ABC and NBC as among "the worst and most biased networks" and endorsed revoking their licenses. The FCC does not license networks themselves — it licenses individual stations, and only a fraction of those are network-owned. Stripping a license requires a formal proceeding and a finding that a station failed its public-interest obligations, a bar the agency has almost never applied to a broadcaster's editorial judgment about which speeches to carry.
Originally reported by Forbes.