By David Shepardson and Trevor Hunnicutt
WASHINGTON (Reuters) -U.S. President Donald Trump said on Tuesday that broadcasting licenses used by affiliates of Walt Disney’s ABC should be “taken away” after he disagreed with a question posed by a reporter for the network.
Trump made the comment after a reporter for ABC News asked Trump about the Jeffrey Epstein political scandal during an Oval Office event with the Saudi crown prince.
“I think the license should be taken away from ABC, because your news is so fake and it’s so wrong,” Trump said.
Trump praised Federal Communications Commission Chair Brendan Carr, whom he had tapped to lead the agency in January. “He should look at that,” Trump said of removing the licenses.
Carr visited with Trump in Florida this weekend, according to a social media post from Carr.
It was the second time in recent months that ABC has been in Trump’s cross-hairs.
Trump in September praised Carr after he pressured broadcasters to take ABC late-night talk show host Jimmy Kimmel off air after Kimmel made comments about the assassination of conservative activist Charlie Kirk. Trump also suggested that broadcasters’ licenses should be taken away.
Trump has repeatedly called on the FCC to revoke the station licenses of ABC and Comcast-owned NBC and charge them for using the public airwaves.
The FCC, an independent federal agency, issues eight-year licenses to individual broadcast stations, not networks. The FCC can revoke a license under a rarely used public interest standard but it has not done so for more than four decades.
Earlier this month, Trump called on NBC to fire late-night talk show host Seth Meyers and criticized the host’s satirical monologue.
In July, the FCC approved the $8.4 billion merger between CBS parent Paramount Global and Skydance Media, after Skydance agreed to ensure CBS news and entertainment programming is free of bias, and to hire an ombudsman for at least two years to review complaints and end diversity programs.
In January, Carr had reinstated complaints about a CBS “60 Minutes” interview with then-Vice President Kamala Harris, how ABC News moderated the pre-election televised debate between then-President Joe Biden and Trump, and Comcast-owned NBC for allowing Harris to appear on “Saturday Night Live” shortly before the election.
Trump’s first FCC chair, Ajit Pai, in 2017 had rejected Trump’s calls to revoke NBC licenses over the content of a news report, saying the agency “does not have the authority to revoke a license of a broadcast station based on the content.”
(Reporting by Steve Holland, David Shepardson and Trevor Hunnicutt in Washington; Editing by Leslie Adler)
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