President Donald Trump on Friday said the nation’s television networks should have their broadcast licenses cancelled because coverage of him is overwhelmingly negative despite his victory in last year’s presidential election.
Speaking in the Oval Office during a question-and-answer session with reporters, Trump was asked to defend his claim to be a champion of free speech in the wake of Federal Communications Commission Chair Brendan Carr’s demand that ABC affiliate stations refuse to carry Jimmy Kimmel’s late night comedy show after one of the comedian’s monologues angered Republican activists.
The network announced earlier this week that Kimmel’s show would be suspended indefinitely after two large station owners, Nexstar and Sinclair, announced that they would pre-empt the program. The two television conglomerates are attempting to merge and Carr had implied that he could block the merger unless Kimmel was benched.
Pressed on whether he still believes in the U.S. Constitution’s guarantee of freedom of speech, Trump said he is a “very strong person for free speech” but he pivoted to complaining about how news coverage and other publicity on television did not become more sycophantic towards him out of respect for his win in last year’s election.
“When you have that kind of that level of popularity or voter support, as I did in the last election. And yet, 97 and 94 … percent of people are against me in the sense of the … newscasts are against me … they’ll take a great story and they’ll make it bad,” he said.
“See, I think that’s really illegal. You can’t have a free airway, if you’re getting free airwaves from the United States government … you can’t have that,” he added.
Trump continued his litany of complaints about television news coverage of him and his administration and suggested that negative reporting about him by broadcast news falls outside of free speech protections.
“I think that reporting has to be at least accurate, at least accurate, to an extent. Again, when somebody is given 97% of the stories are bad about a person that’s no longer free speech,” he said.
“That’s just cheating, and they cheat and they become really members of the Democrat National Committee. That’s what they are. The networks, my opinion, they’re just offshoots of the Democrat National Committee.”
Trump’s comments came after Carr’s heavy-handed treatment of the ABC affiliate stations drew condemnation from some conservatives who warned that it represented overreach of the kind they’ve long opposed.
Texas Senator Ted Cruz, the chair of the Senate Commerce Committee which oversees the FCC, said Carr’s actions were unbelievably dangerous” and compared some of his rhetoric to “mafioso” tactics.
Cruz criticized the FCC chair while speaking on an episode of his podcast, Verdict with Ted Cruz in which he said he was personally “thrilled” by Kimmel’s suspension even as he was troubled by the fact that it was done at the behest of a government regulator.
“I hate what Jimmy Kimmel said. I am thrilled that he was fired,” Cruz said. “But let me tell you: If the government gets in the business of saying, ‘We don’t like what you, the media, have said. We’re going to ban you from the airwaves if you don’t say what we like,’ that will end up bad for conservatives.”
For his part, Trump rejected Cruz’s criticisms of his hand-picked telecommunications regulator, telling reporters on Friday that Carr is a “great patriot” in his view.
