ABC’s License Should Be Revoked
Government power helped create propaganda media and government power should be used to fix it.
On Tuesday, the latest political stunt by left-wing ABC News occurred when White House correspondent Mary Bruce took a pot shot at visiting Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman on the occasion of a historic agreement he reached with President Donald Trump.
Bruce asserted: “Your Royal Highness, the U.S. intelligence concluded that you orchestrated the brutal murder of a journalist, 9/11 families are furious that you are here in the Oval Office. Why should Americans trust you? And the same to you, Mr. President.”
Enough is enough:
Bruce and her ABC News colleagues should be removed from the White House immediately and permanently.
ABC and the other old-line networks should be forced to spin off their news divisions or have their broadcast licenses revoked.
PBS should be de-funded and privatized.
The murdered “journalist” to whom Bruce referred was Islamic activist Jamal Khashoggi. The non-U.S. citizen was killed at the Saudi consulate in Istanbul seven years ago. Khashoggi was a fan of the Saudis until falling out of favor with that government. He then gradually became a vocal opponent. The Washington Post not only gave him a column but produced it as the Post’s sole major content in English and Arabic—effectively an act of political warfare against the Saudi government.
While Khashoggi’s murder was depraved, Saudi Arabia has been held significantly to account for the incident.
When asked about Khashoggi’s death and the Saudis in 2019, presidential candidate Joe Biden said, “We were going to, in fact, make them pay the price, and make them, in fact, the pariah that they are.”
What followed was a diplomatic and human rights disaster. Biden tried to isolate the Saudis while going soft on governments like that of Iran, which murders dissidents by the hundreds or thousands each year and has the blood of thousands of murdered Americans on its hands. (Turkey, where Khashoggi was killed, also had an astounding record for incarcerating and torturing reporters.)
As the price of gasoline in the United States spiked toward $4.70 in July 2022, Biden had to climb down. He went to Saudi Arabia, was obliged to fist bump bin Salman in front of the cameras, and privately begged him to increase oil production. In other words, the hysterical action that Bruce implicitly advocated on Tuesday has been tried already and failed.
All of this is ancient history by diplomatic and political standards. What matters today is that bin Salman agreed to invest $1 trillion in the United States, buy the U.S.-made F-35 fighter jet, and hinted at the possibility of joining the Abraham Accords with Israel and the United States if events in Gaza—with which Saudi Arabia may also help—move in a productive trajectory. Furthermore, through a strong relationship with the Saudis, the United States can privately urge on the evolution of that nation—which has already changed dramatically this century.
Bruce’s misconduct fits a well-established pattern of left-wing bias and political activism at ABC News. Just last summer, ABC’s Terry Moran “reported” that Trump and his deputy chief of staff, Stephen Miller, were “world-class haters.” He said that Miller “eats his hate,” whatever that means. After Moran was fired, he admitted the whole organization was biased, musing:
Were we biased? Yes. Almost inadvertently, I’d say. ABC News has the same problem so many leading cultural institutions do in America: A lack of viewpoint diversity.
In the lead-up to the 2024 presidential election, ABC News tried aggressively to help Democrat Kamala Harris and harm Trump. George Stephanopoulos—a former political operative in the Clinton White House who should not even be allowed to play pretend journalist—lied repeatedly on air, stating that Trump had been “found liable for rape.” After being sued for libel by Trump, ABC coughed up $16 million and expressed public regret. Yet, Stephanopoulos still works for the network and has his own show.
These are hardly isolated incidents for ABC News or its progressive allies at CBS News, PBS, and NBC News. Democrat politicians and candidates do not really need big press outfits since the progressive media does their job for them.
Is talk of revoking the broadcast licenses of parent networks contrary to the First Amendment, which states, “Congress shall make no law… abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press…”?
Certainly not. The networks still benefit from a time when most Americans consumed news from TV sets that had 12 VHF channels dominated by ABC, CBS, NBC, and, to a lesser extent, PBS. Despite the subsequent rise and dominance of cable and the internet, a surprising 18–20% of U.S. households still watch free TV with an “over-the-air” antenna.
The networks benefit from their stake in this valuable part of the radio spectrum—known as “beachfront spectrum” because of its highly desirable and useful characteristics. Furthermore, even with most Americans getting their news via other technologies, the incumbent networks have an unfair advantage in propagating their left-wing news from decades of that government-sponsored dominance. It is time for this to end.
One can get to this conclusion without the need to decide whether the First Amendment has limitations. Nonetheless, it clearly must. In the same way the Second Amendment’s guarantee of my right “to keep and bear arms” unfortunately does not give me the right to possess a belt-fed machine gun or a 155-mm howitzer, the First Amendment, like all of the rest, must have some limitation.
Surely the American people must be allowed to have some say in the way their media is constituted and managed. According to Gallup, the media is trusted by an all-time low of 28% of Americans. It is time for the Trump administration to act decisively, with or without Congress, to improve this lamentable situation.
The message should be clear to ABC, CBS, and NBC: rename, drop, and divest the news divisions and their programming or the parent networks lose their broadcast licenses.
Establishment Republicans might like to pretend that the free market will cure these problems. One deficiency with that assumption is that the market is not really free for reasons described above. Another is that such change simply has not emerged despite market forces.
Many media business analysts assumed that after Roger Ailes discovered an obscure, right-leaning demographic called “half of America” and created wildly successful Fox News, others might follow. Yet even today, the audiences of ABC, CBS, and NBC’s main evening news shows average 7.5, 4.2, and 6 million viewers—larger than Fox’s and Newsmax’s flagship news programs’ audiences combined.
The networks also distribute left-wing propaganda through morning shows, late-night “comedy” shows, and let’s not forget ABC’s odious The View. Conservatives should accept the reality that government power made the networks dominant and it will take government power to create a more fair and balanced media that serves the public.
Furthermore, it is well past time for the White House to reformat its media practices and remove the White House correspondents, replacing them with videographers and other voices. Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich and I recommended steps like this in 2016, when Trump was first elected. In the ensuing eight years, AI has made White House correspondents even more obsolete. Simply put, a computer can summarize government activities better than any person, far faster, and with less bias.
Journalists should focus on investigative reporting—not shouting at foreign leaders and the U.S. president to advance a left-wing political agenda.
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Flashback:
Trump Should Skip Beltway Media
December 13, 2016
By: Christian Whiton, and Newt Gingrich
Donald Trump didn’t just beat Hillary Clinton, he also defeated the left-wing news media—by exposing its prejudices and taking his case directly to the American people. He can continue this success into his presidency by modernizing the flow of news and disintermediating the elitist Beltway press…
Read more: https://nationalinterest.org/feature/trump-should-skip-beltway-media-18728
Journalism as practiced by the big three and a half networks has bumped along to a smaller and smaller place in the American attention. It has landed just a few credibility precentage points from the supermarket tabloid Weekly World News. It accomplished this in the same way as the News: reporting hoaxes as fact. Leave them alone and let shareholders and market forces starve these entities as surely they are and will.
This article is not about ABC; it is a view into the enwokening of the right. One might have thought that when Trump took the wheel that leftist tendency to “cancel”, finally might be usurped by freedom of expression absent government or social pressures. Fascinating that now Republicans are in power, a column called "Capitalist Notes" has an article with a subtitle including the text "government power should be used to fix it". Reagan rolls in his grave. Consider the real point you’re making – embarrassing the Crown Prince of Saudi Arabia is grounds to strip back the first amendment. This is America. We ask the government hard-to-answer, often stupid, and frequently inappropriate questions. That is our birthright. Here are some better ideas than your communist one:
-Encourage more young people of right-of-center perspectives to enter the media industry and not be intimidated by existing bias.
- Reduce government power over broadcast structurally; more spectrum auctions, fewer special rents, less regulatory favoritism, not to hand even more discretionary censorship power to the state through the revocation of broadcast licenses.
-Build a conservative legal fund that is dedicated to suing media outlets when they lie to hold them accountable (which your own article posits as an effective solution).
"The First Amendment, like all of the rest, must have some limitation." What a chilling quote, straight from the apparatchiks controlling Twitter in the early 2020s. Curbing free speech is not and never will be the answer.