During his first year as president, Donald Trump suggested that "NBC and the Networks" should lose their "licenses" because their "partisan, distorted and fake" news coverage was "bad for [the] country" and "not fair to [the] public." Ajit Pai, the Republican chair of the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), pushed back, saying, "The FCC under my leadership will stand for the First Amendment, and under the law the FCC does not have the authority to revoke a license of a broadcast station based on the content of a particular newscast."
Undeterred by that rebuke, Trump has repeatedly re-upped the idea that broadcast licenses should be contingent on whether they are used to air content that offends him. Last November, for instance, he complained that MSNBC "uses FREE government approved airwaves" to execute "a 24 hour hit job on Donald J. Trump and the Republican Party for purposes of ELECTION INTERFERENCE." He declared that "our so-called 'government' should come down hard on them and make them pay for their illegal political activity."
