Donald Trump is closing his election campaign by going full fascist. Deportation forces, eugenics, state violence against internal enemies — he’s playing all the hits. And like every aspiring dictator, Mango Mussolini is attacking the free press.
“TAKE AWAY THE CBS LICENSE,” he screeched after the network edited Vice President Kamala Harris’s 60 Minutes interview for clarity and length, a bog-standard journalistic practice that he calls “Election Interference,” “a major Campaign Finance Violation,” and “the single biggest scandal in broadcast history.”
Last month Trump threatened ABC for daring to fact check him in the “rigged” debate. Now he wants a forced sale of CBS for the dastardly crime of video editing.
Leave aside that using the government to retaliate against a news outlet for disfavored speech is the prototypical violation of the First Amendment. And let’s agree for the moment to ignore the clanging hypocrisy of a guy who spawned the term “sanewashing” whining that the media cleans up his rival’s syntax.
Legally speaking, there are two major problems with Trump’s plan. First, television networks don’t have licenses. The vast majority of broadcast licenses are granted to independently-owned affiliates of the major networks. And second, even if networks did have licenses, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) wouldn’t have the power to rescind them for preferring one candidate over another, whether in a debate or a 60 Minutes interview.
That’s Not How Any Of This Works
Like all executive branch agencies, the FCC has the legal power to enact regulations only insofar as it has been expressly delegated such authority by Congress. (It’s a part of the “Deep State” that Republicans profess to hate so much when Democrats are in power.) Specifically, the FCC’s authority to regulate communications derives from the Communications Act of 1934, which created it. The first broadcast network, NBC, was formed in 1926, but the Act does not mention the word “network,” much less grant the agency explicit authority to regulate them.
The FCC is responsible for allocating broadcast spectrum rights, a finite resource, to local television and radio stations. That’s necessary because, for example, if two or more radio stations both broadcast simultaneously at 97.9 megahertz (MHz), the result will be an incomprehensible mess.
Although over-the-air radio and television broadcasts have steadily declined in favor of cable and internet over the past 40 years, space on the electromagnetic spectrum remains a scarce resource. It also means that networks are less reliant on local broadcast stations to serve as distribution channels, and that local affiliates aren’t the pain point for networks that they were in the era of four channels you accessed by turning a dial on the TV set and futzing with the rabbit ears. (This nostalgia is very on brand for a candidate who routinely inflicts songs from the musical “Cats” on his supporters.)
The FCC is only authorized to regulate individual stations by revoking or refusing to grant or renew a station’s broadcast license. In theory, that empowers the agency to exercise indirect control over the networks by threatening to cancel their affiliates’ licenses. In practice, the FCC completely abandoned the idea of pressuring television networks to remain politically neutral back in 1987 when conservatives killed the Fairness Doctrine during the Reagan administration.
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