There are only 2 and a half years left to put up with this. Donald Trump, in his supposed fight to preserve free speech (that is, his own), has asked that ABC and NBC, two networks that have a combined 165 years of television history, stop broadcasting immediately and lose their broadcast licenses. The reason? That yesterday they decided not to air his address to the nation which, supposedly, was meant to interrupt all programming. God Save America and all that.
If they don’t say what I want, I sulk
Don’t think it was a speech to tell the public anything important: it was 25 minutes of talking about how China boycotted the 2020 election that he didn’t win, but, of course, with no evidence of any kind. Because, I mean, no such evidence exists. Trump has warned that ABC and NBC are part of the conspiracy and want to keep the election fraud going. “All we want is honesty in our elections and in the news”, he said as cool as you please.
It’s not as if the rest of the channels took him very seriously either. CBS aired part of the speech, but warned viewers that much of what the president says on that subject is false, but they’re covering it because it’s news. After all, as they warned, it’s not lost on anyone that these claims come right before midterm elections that are already shaping up to be absolutely catastrophic for the current administration.
Although the president had already threatened NBC and ABC before, this time there’s something new: they’ve ordered ABC to seek early renewal of its 8 station licenses from the FCC so that the agency, controlled by the Republicans, can determine whether it has served the public interest. We shouldn’t forget that Trump personally called NBC’s president to ask him to fire Jimmy Kimmel immediately, and he decided to run rings around him, so the bad blood has been building and growing for years.
What’s going to happen now? Nobody knows. The president still has time to completely destabilize the American media landscape, and he’s well on his way to doing it, especially if the elections, as seems likely, leave him looking bad. Fight fire with fire, he seems to say. And they’ve prepared one giant blaze.
