Two networks declined to carry the speech. Under a standard the commission is drafting, that is now something a broadcast license can be reviewed for.
WASHINGTON—Responding to two networks’ decision not to interrupt regular programming for a presidential address, the Federal Communications Commission is drafting a public interest standard under which a broadcaster’s choice not to carry the President would be logged as a failure to serve the public, three officials familiar with the draft said.
The effort follows the President’s assertion last week that ABC and NBC should lose their broadcast licenses for declining to air his Thursday speech on election integrity, a claim he made without evidence, tying the refusal to what he called a larger fraud. “They and others in the media are part of a plot,” he said. Fox carried the speech live. CBS preempted programming for a special report that aired part of it and noted the President’s long history of false statements about election security.
What the Public Interest Standard Measures
Under the draft, administered by a newly created Office of Carriage Compliance, a seven-person unit operating out of a converted records room on the commission’s eighth floor, each broadcaster receives a carriage score at license renewal. A decision to air a presidential address counts toward the public-interest obligation. A decision not to air one is recorded as a non-carriage event and counts against it. The office began scoring on Monday.
The standard also evaluates carriage in advance. One senior commission official, speaking on condition of anonymity to describe a draft that has not been released, said the office had begun assessing whether networks would carry a future address, on the reasoning that a broadcaster’s disposition toward the President is itself a measure of its commitment to the public. The commission is not the first agency to grade its own conduct against a standard of its choosing; the Department of Homeland Security recently characterized a fatal shooting as a matter of public safety rather than self-defense.
“A broadcast license is a public trust,” the official said. “The public’s interest is in hearing from its President. A network that declines to carry him has, by definition, declined to serve the public. We are not describing a penalty. We are describing what a license is for.”
Where the Public Is Presumed to Be
Both networks did, in fact, carry the speech. ABC ran it on its streaming service and its radio network. NBC carried it live on its streaming service and aired a special report afterward. None of it counts under the draft. The obligation attaches to the public airwaves, the official said, which the commission presumes is where the public is, and streaming is not the public airwaves.
The office is separately reviewing whether a network that carries an address and then fact-checks it has carried it at all. One cable channel began airing the speech and interrupted it for fact-checks, a sequence the draft provisionally classifies as a non-carriage event with intervening steps. A determination is expected within the month.
The Licenses Already Under Review
The commission has moved against one network already. Its chairman, Brendan Carr, called in ABC’s eight broadcast station licenses for early review over an investigation into the network’s diversity practices, and has examined whether the daytime program “The View” violated the equal-time rule, which ABC says it has long been exempt from. The President has described the arrangement in economic terms. “They use our public multi-billion-dollar-in-value airways for absolutely no money,” he said. “They pay nothing for multibillion dollar assets.”
The White House communications director had attacked the two networks before the President spoke, writing that they did not want the public to hear the truth. Fox, which carried the speech live and in 2023 settled a defamation suit with a voting-machine company for $787.5 million, told viewers it could not evaluate the accuracy of the claims. Under the draft, the network that aired the address and declined to vouch for it scores the same as the ones that carried it in full. It carried the President, which is what the public interest standard measures.
Asked what a broadcaster could do to satisfy the public interest standard if carrying the speech and fact-checking it did not, the official said the commission was reviewing that question and expected to have an answer by the next address.
Developing.
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