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Trump Ratchets Up Threats on the Media

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Trump Ratchets Up Threats on the Media

Presidents are not all-powerful, but, if elected, Donald Trump would have some influence with the federal regulators who oversee major television networks.

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Former President Donald Trump stands in front of a crowd of members of the media, many pointing cameras at him.
Former President Donald J. Trump speaks to the media after debating Vice President Kamala Harris. He has since called for ABC’s license to be “terminated” because of his displeasure with how the network handled the debate.Credit…Kenny Holston/The New York Times

Michael M. Grynbaum and David McCabe

Reporting from New York and Washington

Oct. 21, 2024

Threatening the news media is nothing new for former President Donald J. Trump. He has accused major news outlets of defamation, blocked journalists from rallies and White House events, goaded followers into profane chants about CNN and popularized the term “fake news,” now embraced by autocrats around the world.

Even by those standards, though, his latest anti-media obsession — stripping television networks of their ability to broadcast the news because of coverage he doesn’t like — stands out.

“CBS should lose its license,” Mr. Trump wrote on his Truth Social platform last week. “60 Minutes should be immediately taken off the air.” He has repeated his demands in speeches and in interviews, echoing his earlier calls for ABC’s license to be “terminated” because of his displeasure with how the network handled his debate against Vice President Kamala Harris.

On Sunday, Mr. Trump ratcheted up his threats against CBS. “We’re going to subpoena their records,” he told Fox News in an interview, repeating his claim that the network’s edit of Ms. Harris’s recent appearance on “60 Minutes” was misleading. Asked if revoking a broadcast license was a “drastic punishment,” Mr. Trump did not answer directly, instead lobbing a string of insults at Ms. Harris, whom he called “incompetent” and “a Marxist.”

During the “60 Minutes” interview, which aired on Oct. 7, Ms. Harris was asked about the war in the Middle East. In an early excerpt released by CBS a day before, Ms. Harris gave one lengthy answer; in the episode itself, Ms. Harris appeared to give a different, pithier reply.

Mr. Trump — who got into a tiff with CBS ahead of the “60 Minutes” episode, and declined to sit for an interview of his own — quickly seized on the editing as evidence of pro-Harris bias. “60 Minutes” said on Sunday that the “two” answers were merely taken from different sections of Ms. Harris’s full response to the question, and that Mr. Trump’s accusation of deceitful editing “is false.”

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Source: https://www.nytimes.com