by Sharon Rondeau
(Nov. 29, 2023) — Between late Tuesday and early Wednesday, 45th President and 2024 leading Republican presidential candidate Donald J. Trump sounded off on a myriad of topics, not the least of which was the animosity he perceives from MSNBC, a subsidiary of the NBCUniversal conglomerate and decidedly sympathetic to the Democrat Party cause.
NBCUniversal itself is a subsidiary of Comcast, which Wikipedia describes as “the largest American multinational telecommunications and media conglomerate.[8] Its holdings include Telemundo; “Rotten Tomatoes”; UniversalTV, its international television network; the Dreamworks Channel; CNBC; Universal Pictures and the Universal Orlando Resort, among scores of others worldwide.
“MSNBC (MSDNC) uses FREE government approved airwaves, and yet it is nothing but a 24 hour hit job on Donald J. Trump and the Republican Party for purposes of ELECTION INTERFERENCE,” Trump posted on TruthSocial between 11:00 p.m. and midnight Tuesday.
“Brian Roberts, its Chairman and CEO, is a slimeball who has been able to get away with these constant attacks for years,” Trump went on in what some in the media termed a “rant.” “It is the world’s biggest political contribution to the Radical Left Democrats who, by the way, are destroying our Country,” he added.
The network does not necessarily strive for balance in its reporting and on Wednesday contains a wide variety of articles focusing on Trump’s opposition, the alleged “harms” women face from state laws limiting abortion, and one anchor’s perceived danger from “far-right plotters trying to steer our nation toward an alliance with the Nazis.”
During his term in the White House, Trump declared “the press” “the enemy of the people.”
Trump concluded Tuesday’s musings on the MSNBC with, “Our so-called ‘government’ should come down hard on them and make them pay for their illegal political activity. Much more to come, watch!”
It is unclear if Trump was forecasting some type of imminent restriction against the network or if he was promising action a second Trump administration would take should he be reelected on November 5, 2024.
The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) claims to strongly support the First Amendment’s guarantee of freedom of speech by refraining from substantial intervention in broadcast material except under specific circumstances warranted by law.
According to the FCC on the topic of “Regulation of Broadcast Radio and Television“:
The FCC allocates a portion of the broadcast spectrum to new broadcast stations based upon both the relative needs of various communities for additional broadcast outlets, and specified engineering standards designed to prevent interference among stations and other communications users. Whenever we review an application – whether to build a new station, modify or renew the license of an existing station or sell a station – we must determine if granting the application would serve the public interest. As mentioned earlier, we expect station licensees to be aware of the important problems and issues facing their local communities and to foster public understanding by presenting programming that relates to those local issues. Broadcasters – not the FCC or any other government agency – are responsible for selecting the material they air. The First Amendment and the Communications Act expressly prohibit the Commission from censoring broadcast matter. Our role in overseeing program content is very limited. We license only individual broadcast stations. We do not license TV or radio networks (such as CBS, NBC, ABC or Fox) or other organizations that stations have relationships with, such as PBS or NPR, except if those entities are also station licensees. In general, we also do not regulate information provided over the Internet, nor do we intervene in private disputes involving broadcast stations or their licensees. Instead, we usually defer to the parties, courts, or other agencies to resolve these disputes.
On the topic of “News Distortion,” the agency states:
The Commission often receives complaints concerning broadcast journalism, such as allegations that stations have aired inaccurate or one-sided news reports or comments, covered stories inadequately, or overly dramatized the events that they cover. For the reasons noted previously, the Commission generally will not intervene in these cases because it would be inconsistent with the First Amendment to replace the journalistic judgment of licensees with our own. However, as public trustees, broadcast licensees may not intentionally distort the news. The FCC has stated that “rigging or slanting the news is a most heinous act against the public interest.” The Commission will investigate a station for news distortion if it receives documented evidence of rigging or slanting, such as testimony or other documentation, from individuals with direct personal knowledge that a licensee or its management engaged in the intentional falsification of the news. Of particular concern would be evidence of the direction to employees from station management to falsify the news. However, absent such a compelling showing, the Commission will not intervene.
According to the Communications Act of 1934, the media is, however, expected to work in the “public interest.”
Believe it or not, there was a time 3 or 4 decades ago when the term “public interest” meant something in Communications Law. Every so many years, the stations had to renew their broadcast permits and establish that they operated in the public interest. Citizens could fight them. That all went away since politicians, Republicans, and Democrats did not want their friends in the media to be at risk of losing their voices. So, we citizens lost our voice.