President Trump’s threat to revoke the broadcast licenses of media that anger him, including those that decided not to run his speech last Thursday—namely, ABC and
NBC—is drawing pushback from media firms and commentators, Politico reports. “We’ve never in this country had a law that permits a royal decree for news coverage,”
said Robert Corn-Revere, a former top FCC who’s now chief counsel for the Foundation of Individual Rights and Expression. “If you expressly
link a licensing proceeding to whether or not the networks are airing coverage that the president wants covered, then whatever legitimacy that those proceedings might have had is automatically
diminished if you link them.”