Why Pulling an FCC License Doesn’t Mean What Trump Thinks It Means

Over the first eight months of this President’s administration, especially over the last few weeks, there have been a number of threats by both the President and the FCC Commissioner Brendan Carr to yank the FCC licenses of certain networks that do not appropriately “bend the knee.” That threat ultimately led to the suspension of Jimmy Kimmel Live!, but it didn’t stop Carr from continuing to threaten ABC over The View, another ABC program that the President hates.

What a lot of people don’t understand — and, to be honest, I doubt that Donald Trump even understands this — is that you can’t pull ABC’s FCC license. The network itself does not have an FCC license. Affiliate stations have FCC licenses (although ABC does own a few affiliates). Ultimately, that was the reason that Kimmel was suspended: not because Brendan Carr threatened the FCC license of ABC, but because he threatened the licenses of those affiliates.

Carr is almost certainly not going to pull the licenses from those affiliates, because pulling those licenses hurts those affiliates far more than it would hurt ABC. The FCC only regulates the use of public airwaves — in other words, the ability of those stations to broadcast to people using over-the-air antennas. If, for instance, the FCC pulled the license for an ABC affiliate in Buffalo, New York, people who watch Dancing with the Stars would no longer be able to watch it using their antennas. But they could still watch Dancing with the Stars on cable or streaming because the FCC doesn’t regulate cable or streaming.

Obviously, that would hurt ABC because it would no longer receive those affiliate fees and ultimately, I think, it would hasten the death of broadcast television. But ABC could still air Dancing with the Stars on Hulu, Disney+, and on cable, and they could still collect carriage fees, streaming subscriptions, and ad dollars.

You know what happens to the affiliate station? It’s done. It will have zero ability to survive. That means no local news or other local programming from the ABC affiliate. It also means trusted local anchors lose their jobs, and it means pissing off the small percentage of people who are still using antennas to watch Dancing with the Stars because they’re either going to have to pay for cable or a streaming service to continue watching or go without Dancing with the Stars.

But do you know who it hurts the most? The affiliates. And do you know who owns many of the affiliates? Conservative-leaning corporations like Sinclair, Nexstar, and Gray. Those conservative corporations would go under. Those conservative corporations would no longer be able to air their conservative-leaning local news programs. And Donald Trump wouldn’t stop at ABC. He’d yank the licenses of NBC over Fallon and Seth Meyers. And Fox because The Simpsons got a little too political. ABC, NBC, and Fox programming would continue to exist, only it would be distributed by other means — but the conservative-leaning affiliates would crumble, and the conservative viewers in rural areas who still use antennas to watch Dancing with the Stars, The Voice, and the local news would be SOL.

Could Trump still do it? Sure. But it would require revoking hundreds of licenses, pissing off a lot of red-staters who just want to watch Dancing with the Stars for free, and killing hundreds of conservative-leaning affiliate networks, not to mention the lawsuits, Congressional hearings, protests, and public outcry that would follow because Jim and Glenda outside of Buffalo can’t watch their stories anymore without contributing $80 a month to the networks that Trump was trying to punish in the first place.

Don’t get me wrong: pulling those affiliates would be detrimental to ABC and Disney’s bottom line. But it would be catastrophic to conservative-leaning corporations like Sinclair, Nexstar, and Gray, and it would infuriate a lot of Republicans who just wanted to see those two Mormon wives dance on TV.