NBC and ABC Just Made One of the Most Important Editorial Decisions in Modern American Broadcast History. Here’s Why It Matters — and Why It’s Complicated.
ABC and NBC have decided not to broadcast President Donald Trump’s planned prime-time address on their main broadcast networks. Instead, both networks will carry the speech on their streaming platforms — NBC News NOW and ABC News Live — but not on the channels that reach the roughly 40% of American households that still rely primarily on over-the-air broadcast television.
The address puts ABC, CBS, NBC, and Fox between a rock and a hard place: air potentially false claims about the 2020 election, or risk backlash from the White House and a confrontational Federal Communications Commission.
That sentence is the one that deserves the most attention in this story, and it’s the one that most coverage will glide past. The Federal Communications Commission regulates broadcast licenses. The FCC is currently led by a Trump appointee. The networks that air this speech face one kind of risk. The networks that don’t face another. Both risks flow from the same source: an administration that has demonstrated its willingness to use every available lever of federal power against institutions it considers adversarial.
NBC said it will provide live coverage of the president’s remarks at 9 PM ET on NBC News NOW and air a special report on the network afterward. ABC said it will air the speech on ABC News Live and ABC News Radio with comprehensive, anchored coverage, and is fully prepared to break into network programming should significant developments occur.
Translation: they’ll cover it. They’ll fact-check it. They won’t hand over the broadcast spectrum to carry it live and unfiltered to the maximum possible audience — the specific thing the White House wanted.
The Precedent Question
There is precedent for the move — networks previously declined to air certain speeches given by President Barack Obama and President Joe Biden in real time. In 2022, ABC, CBS, and NBC all declined to run a speech by President Biden about threats to democracy that sharply criticized Trump and those who denied the 2020 election results.
This is the fact that Trump and his allies will use tonight and tomorrow, and it deserves a direct response. Yes, networks have declined presidential addresses before. The Biden speech they declined was also about election denial — about the threat Trump posed to democracy. The networks made a judgment that a sitting president giving a partisan address about a political opponent did not meet the threshold for mandatory broadcast carriage.
Tonight, a sitting president is giving an address about his own election loss that every court, audit, and his own Justice Department found was not stolen. The networks are making the same judgment in the same direction. The symmetry, for once, is actually symmetric.
What This Is Really About
The speech the networks declined to carry in full is a speech that election officials say is based on intelligence that no evidence has been found supports claims of foreign intrusions that changed results of past elections.
By casting the 2020 election as illegitimate, Trump is laying the groundwork to challenge Republican losses and undermine Democrats if they win back power in Congress in November, multiple election experts have said.
That is the context in which NBC and ABC made their decision. Not “should we air a presidential address” in the abstract. Should we hand over our broadcast spectrum — the public airwaves, licensed by the federal government, regulated by an FCC the president controls — to carry live and uninterrupted a speech whose stated purpose is to cast doubt on the election system four months before the midterms, with no right of reply, no fact-checking in real time, no ability for viewers to know what is verified and what is not.
They decided: no. Stream it. Cover it. Fact-check it afterward. Don’t give it the imprimatur of mandatory live carriage that presidential addresses normally receive when they address matters of genuine national importance.
The Risk They’re Taking
This decision is not without cost. The administration has already subpoenaed four New York Times journalists. It has created a joint Pentagon-DOJ task force to pursue press leaks. It has watched as the FCC chair has made clear his willingness to use the commission’s powers in ways previous chairs have not. The networks made this call knowing that the administration will be furious, that there will be consequences, and that those consequences will be administered by an FCC with a mandate and a temperament the industry has not seen before.
Networks have broad First Amendment rights to decide what they choose to broadcast, experts noted. But historically, broadcasters have carried most such speeches on the grounds that they provide information of public importance.
The networks are essentially arguing — without saying it quite this directly — that this speech does not provide information of public importance. It provides the president’s unverified claims about a six-year-old election, dressed in the authority of declassified intelligence, for the purpose of delegitimizing an election system four months before votes are cast.
That argument is correct. It is also going to cost them something. And they made it anyway.
That is the definition of editorial courage in a moment when editorial courage is in short supply. It is imperfect — the speech will still be widely streamed and watched, and the decision creates a grievance the administration will exploit — but it is better than the alternative, which is handing the president the full power of the broadcast spectrum to tell the country the elections can’t be trusted, uninterrupted, at 9 PM on a Thursday, while Karoline Leavitt this afternoon declined to say he would accept the results of November.
Watch the speech. Know what’s in it. Know what’s not in it. Know why the networks that usually carry these things decided this one was different.
Then vote.