| The US president has threatened some media with license deprivation. The occasion is a report that he wants to increase the US nuclear weapons program. Trump speaks of fake news. Donald Trump News |
Donald Trump threatened US media with the withdrawal of licenses. “With all the bad news coming from NBC and the companies. when is it appropriate to question their licenses. bad for the country!” The US President wrote on Twitter. Later, he also said in the White House, “It’s frankly disgusting that the press is able to write whatever it wants to write.”
The President responded with his tweet to the NBC statement that he was calling for an increase in the US nuclear arsenal. NBC, citing participants in a July meeting with security advisers, said Trump had demanded nearly ten times more than the US nuclear arsenal. According to the insiders, Trump was shown a graph at the meeting, which shows the arsenal’s decline from 32,000 in 1960 to a significantly low level today. Then Trump is said to have said he wanted to have the same number of nuclear weapons now. Trump immediately denied the report as “pure fiction.”
The US currently has nearly 1,800 nuclear warheads in aircraft, submarines and intercontinental ballistic missiles. 180 warheads are based in five European countries, according to the Arms Control Association. In addition, the US has a camp of about 4,000 warheads, which are in reserve, but some are not or not yet activated for military use. In addition, 2,000 warheads are discarded. Which could theoretically still be used in parts. In an interview with Reuters. Trump said in February that he wanted to make sure the US was a leader in nuclear armament.
<blockquote class=”twitter-tweet” data-lang=”en”><p lang=”en” dir=”ltr”>With all of the Fake News coming out of NBC and the Networks, at what point is it appropriate to challenge their License? Bad for country!</p>— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) <a href=”https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/918112884630093825?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw”>October 11, 2017</a></blockquote>
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License withdrawal is difficult
The NBC parent company Comcast has not commented on the threat yet. Even a comment by the Broadcasting Authority FCC, which awards the licenses to broadcasters, was not available. However, the Authority itself points out that the strong protection of freedom of expression in the US after the first amendment prohibits censorship: “Our role in program oversight is very limited.”
On the New York Stock Exchange, the Trump tweet caused a bad performance of the media companies. Comcast shares fell about 0.9 percent during the day. The papers of the media company Twenty-First Century Fox slumped by 2.4 percent.
Trump has repeatedly accused the media, such as the New York Times, the Washington Post and CNN, of spreading false news, so-called fake news. For the US government, however, it would be extremely difficult to withdraw the license from a broadcaster. These are not awarded to the societies, so-called networks, in the US as a whole, but staggered for eight years to individual stations, so stations. For example, Comcast has eleven individual channels from New York to San Francisco. Cable broadcasters like CNN or MSNBC do not need such licenses.
In the early 1970’s, then-President Richard Nixon and his advisors had discussed whether the FCC’s licensing could punish the Washington Post for reporting on the Watergate scandal. Nixon resigned because of this bugging.
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