Commentary: Trump wants ABC's broadcast license revoked. That's ironic

Donald Trump wants to punish ABC News for his bad debate night.

“I think ABC took a big hit last night,” Trump told Fox & Friends during a phone debrief early Wednesday morning. “To be honest, they are a news organization — they have to be licensed to do it — they ought to take away their license for the way they did that.”

His call for federal censorship of a broadcaster for merely correcting his blatant falsehoods may offer insights into how the budding authoritarian plans to govern if he is allowed to return to the Oval Office. But as a historian of conservative news, I am also struck by what this episode reveals about the distorted memories of Trump and his supporters — regarding their movement’s relationship to both the Federal Communications Commission and to ABC.

First, technically, broadcast networks aren’t subjected to FCC licensure — though their affiliate stations are. Furthermore, there is no current regulation that authorizes the FCC to punish broadcasters for biased news or commentary. Perhaps Trump is misremembering the “Fairness Doctrine,” a mid-20th century policy that required broadcasters to provide balanced coverage of issues of public controversy. But that regulation was only rarely and often begrudgingly enforced against the networks (it was mostly used against smaller conservative broadcasters, actually), and it was abolished by the Reagan administration in 1987.

Second, conservative belief in “liberal media” bias has long driven media activists to think of initiatives to amplify a right-wing worldview. High on the list is boosting Republican commentators and building conservative media outlets. And ABC has played a surprisingly outsize role in their efforts.

In the early 1950s, amid the Second Red Scare, ABC’s radio and television networks distributed Answers for Americans, a current affairs program funded by the right-wing Texas oilman HL Hunt. While technically in compliance with Fairness Doctrine requirements, including panelists from differing perspectives, the program was geared toward framing current affairs to conform with the burgeoning modern conservative viewpoint.

By the late 1950s, ABC president Leonard Goldenson had struck up a friendship with a young Rupert Murdoch when the budding Australian media mogul visited the U.S. to learn more about the television industry. Murdoch sold ABC a 6% stake in News Ltd., the Australia-based precursor to News Corporation, in exchange for exclusive rights to air ABC television shows in Australia.

Murdoch’s deal with the network allowed him to establish a foothold in Australian television, a crucial step in News Corporation’s transformation into a global media conglomerate. By 1996, he would leverage the company’s economies of scale to launch the conservative Fox News Channel — enabling it to run at a loss for four years until finally breaking even in 2000.

He wouldn’t be the only one. In 1988, not long after the Reagan administration ended the Fairness Doctrine, ABC Radio offered an obscure yet controversial Sacramento talk radio host the early afternoon slot on its national radio network: Rush Limbaugh. He would go on to resurrect the AM radio industry, establishing himself as perhaps the country’s most influential right-wing radio commentator until his death from cancer in 2021.

None of these boosts have stopped conservatives from accusing ABC of bias in the past. Edith Efron’s conservative-funded 1971 study of broadcasting news coverage of the 1968 presidential campaign used lax methods to find “evidence” of liberal and anti-conservative bias on all three major networks (ABC, CBS and NBC).

A smaller-scale study conducted by the movement-aligned magazine Conservative Digest in 1984 found ABC to be the “least biased” of the three major broadcast networks. But the magazine nevertheless complained that, while covering that year’s major party conventions, ABC had “described the Republicans as ‘very conservative,’ ‘right-wing’ and ‘far right.’” Based on the party’s policies and rhetoric then (and now), those terms are fairly accurate.

But the modern conservative movement has long appealed to people who see a disconnect between the world as it is and the world as they think it “ought to be” — accuracy be damned.

The debate was the latest example. Trump turned what should have been a softball question about Biden administration immigration policy into a convoluted diatribe about crowd sizes at his rallies, followed by a bizarre digression into spreading racist rumors about people eating house pets.

His supporters can’t admit he performed poorly or that he was lying without disrupting the worldview they’ve built around him. So, the problem, in their eyes, is with moderators David Muir and Linsey Davis for refusing to pander to them.

“I’ve been telling you guys for years how much ABC hates Republicans,” the self-identified conservative nepo baby Meghan McCain characteristically complained on X.

If that’s true, the network has had a funny way of showing it.

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This column does not necessarily reflect the opinion of the editorial board or Bloomberg LP and its owners.

A.J. Bauer is an assistant professor of journalism and creative media at the University of Alabama and co-editor of "News on the Right."