No ABC Did Not Engage In Election Interference In [Checks Notes] Fact Checking Donald Trump

In the bizarro world of MAGA politics, up is down, black is white, and apparently, fact-checking is now a form of election interference.

It is no secret that people across the political spectrum have a very warped view of what free speech or the First Amendment means. But I am particularly perplexed by the view of many lately (and this seems to run across the political spectrum, tragically) that fact checking is an attack on free speech and should be punished. It feels ridiculous to even bring this up, but fact checking is not just protected speech, it is the proverbial “more speech” that pretend defenders of the First Amendment always claim is the only possible answer to speech you disagree with.

Anyway, last week you might have heard there was a Presidential debate between Kamala Harris and Donald Trump held on ABC. The CNN debate earlier this year between Trump and Biden included a vow from the moderators that they would do no fact-checking, which resulted in those moderators being roundly criticized.

On the other hand, ABC chose a few narrow points, when the lies were incredibly egregious, to provide simple fact-checks to blatantly false claims. I believe they responded just three times to make factual claims, even though the former President told an astounding number of blatant outright lies (not just exaggerations, but fully invented, made up bullshit).

This has set Republicans off on a ridiculous crusade, claiming that ABC was actively working with the Harris campaign to support it, which is not how any of this actually works. Then, Trump himself claimed that the debate was “rigged” (of course) and told Fox & Friends that (1) you “have to be licensed to” be a news organization and that (2) “they ought to take away their license for the way they did that” (i.e., fact-checked the debate).

Others in Trump’s circles claimed that the fact-checking was a form of “in-kind contribution” to the Harris campaign worth millions of dollars.

All of this is nonsense. First off, one of the complaints was that the moderators fact-checked Trump but didn’t fact-check Harris. There are a few responses to that, including that if you removed the three times they fact-checked Trump and compared things then, they still chose not to fact-check him on many, many more false claims and egregious lies. The second is that the fact-checking complaints around Harris are ones of leaving out context or having slight exaggerations. With Trump it was literal made-up nonsense, such as the false, bigoted claims about eating cats and dogs, or the idea that Democrats support killing babies after birth. Just out and out fearmongering bullshit.

But, again, fact-checking is free speech. The party that claims to be such a big believer in free speech should also support that.

However, even dumber is Trump’s false claim that ABC has to be licensed. That’s not how this works. It’s yet another false statement coming from the mind of a man who seems to only work in false statements. Individual affiliates can require licenses to obtain spectrum, but ABC itself is not something that needs licensing. You don’t need to be licensed to be a news organization.

Just ask Fox News.

Of course, we’ve been through this before with Trump, who has sued many news organizations he’s disliked (without much success) and has made this same bogus threat before. In 2017, he said that NBC should lose its (non-existent) license for reporting on former Secretary of State Rex Tillerson calling Trump a “moron.” A year later, he threatened to pull NBC’s (still non-existent) license over its reporting on Harvey Weinstein.

Earlier this year, he said both NBC and CNN should have their “licenses or whatever” taken away for not giving him free airtime by showing his victory speech following the Iowa caucuses.

All of this is ridiculous. It’s an attempt at intimidation. It’s an attempt to threaten and cajole news organizations to not speak, to not use their First Amendment rights, and to not fact check when the former President spews absolute fucking nonsense.

But, because MAGA world is making a big deal of this, even the FCC Chair, Jessica Rosenworcel, had to put out a statement on the very basics of the First Amendment:

“The FCC does not revoke licenses for broadcast stations simply because a political candidate disagrees with or dislikes content or coverage.”

It is true that there are some very, very, very limited and narrow circumstances under which the FCC can pull a local affiliate’s spectrum license (not the larger network). However, not liking how fact-checking happens is not even in the same zip code as those.

Indeed, if MAGA world is getting into the business of pulling affiliate licenses, they might not like where things end up. There has been an ongoing effort to pull the license from a Fox affiliate in Philadelphia, based specifically on Fox News admitting that it broadcast false information about the 2020 election.

I don’t support such efforts, which likely violate the First Amendment. Even if it’s a closer call when you’re dealing with a network that has effectively admitted to deliberately spreading false information the company knew was false. But here, the call from Trump to remove the license is simply because of a fact check. It was because they told the truth, not because they lied.

When that effort to remove the Fox affiliate’s license came about, MAGA world was furious. Senator Ted Cruz went on a rant about how “the job of policing so-called ‘misinformation’ belongs to the American people—not the federal government” and complained about how “the left” “want the FCC to be a truth commission & censor political discourse—a prospect that is unconstitutional.”

Hey Ted, care to comment on the claims from last week?

I see no similar statement from him about Trump and the MAGA world now demanding the same thing (for much more ridiculous reasons). I combed through his ExTwitter feed and surprisingly (well, not really) he seems to have no issue with his side calling to pull licenses. How typically hypocritical.

Tragically, this has become the modern Republican Party. They are total hypocrites on free speech. When they want to protect their own speech, they wrap themselves up in the cape of the First Amendment, but when someone who disagrees with them speaks up to contradict them with facts, they’re happy to push for censorship and punishment over speech.