Charles Sauer: Can the FCC let us be? – Daily Freeman

Following ABC, NBC, and CBS’s refusal to air Donald Trump’s recent prime-time address, the president threatened to revoke the networks’ broadcasting licenses. The argument is that, by refusing to air the president’s speech, the networks violated their legal obligation as holders of a government-issued broadcast license to act in the public interest.

On its face, this case does not seem unreasonable. After all, denying their audiences the opportunity to hear the president speak on an important issue like election integrity does seem contrary to the public interest.

However, the argument against revoking the licenses is stronger. The Supreme Court has held the FCC cannot exercise its authority in a manner that violates the First Amendment. For example, the FCC cannot retaliate against broadcasters for editorial decisions, such as refusing to air a prime-time presidential address. The argument that any action taken against ABC and NBC for not airing President Trump’s speech is retaliatory is strengthened by FCC Chair Brendan Carr’s threats to revoke broadcast licenses over his displeasure with network news coverage of the Iran War and late-night comedians’ jokes at the expense of conservatives, the president, and the first lady.

Another argument in the broadcasters’ favor is that they did provide live coverage of President Trump’s speech on their websites and YouTube channels. In addition, the speech was not only broadcast on CNN, Fox News, and CSPAN, it was available on those networks’ YouTube channels. Thus, anyone who wanted to see the speech could stream it on their TVs or on their phone, tablet, laptop, or iPad. Those who did not see the live speech can watch it any time by googling “President Trump’s speech on election integrity.”

People can also find a wide variety of commentary on the speech from across the political spectrum on YouTube and other sites. Many of the views, on both the left and right, were ones shut out of mainstream political discourse when the three broadcast networks, newspapers, and national news magazines were the American people’s main (and in some cases only) source of news and opinions.

Federal control of the broadcast spectrum was justified by the limited amount of bandwidth, as well as concerns that without a government bureaucracy determining who could use what parts of the spectrum, broadcasters would infringe on each other’s spaces. Whatever the merits of that argument (there is sound scholarship arguing there is no need for government control of the spectrum anymore than there is a need for government to allocate other scarce resources), the case for government control of the airwaves has been demolished by the rise of the internet.

According to a 2025 Pew Research Center survey, only 47% of Americans between the ages of 18 and 25 sometimes or often get their news from television, while 93% of 18–25-year-olds sometimes or often get news from their smartphones, iPads, and tablets.

The number of young people abandoning television news may not surprise a lot of observers, however, they may be surprised to learn that, according to the Pew survey, 71% of Americans 65 or older get their news from digital devices. This does not mean Americans are abandoning the news networks. It just means they are more likely to use the internet to view programming from the legacy media.

If the FCC successfully revokes network broadcast licenses because of a refusal to air President Trump’s recent election interference speech, the networks would likely move their productions online, where an increasing number of their audience is and the FCC isn’t. Modern technology has eliminated whatever need there was for a federal agency with power to determine who can and cannot use the broadcast spectrum.

Congress should recognize this reality and do what it should have done years ago — shut down the FCC, privatize the broadcast spectrum, and allow the free market of ideas to flourish over the airwaves and online.

It is time for the FCC to finally let us be.

Charles Sauer’s column is distributed by Cagle Cartoons newspaper syndicate.