Donald Trump yesterday threatened to try to take a major American news network off the air in his latest salvo against unflattering coverage amid reports that he wanted to expand the US nuclear arsenal tenfold.
“With all of the Fake News coming out of NBC and the Networks, at what point is it appropriate to challenge their License? Bad for country,” he wrote in a Twitter post.
Hours later, he added: “Network news has become so partisan, distorted and fake that licenses must be challenged and, if appropriate, revoked. Not fair to public!”
Although, actually, you know, it does.
The Murdochs wouldn’t be having problems passing the fit and proper test for Sky if they were generally lefty now, would they? Trinity Mirror hacked just as much as News International and no one’s been spluttering about them.
One monolithic organisation owns and operates the most popular TV channels, most popular radio stations and most popular news site, but it’s Murdoch that has too much power…
Remove all “licensing” requirements and let anybody broadcast anything with the courts only to settle any frequency use disputes. An Internet (sort of) of the air.
Trump won’t of course but a nice dream.
President The Donald is trolling, as usual.
Mr Ecks,
I agree in principle but the problem is that spectrum is a scarce resource. Unlicensed would mean nothing gets heard as everyone jams each other.
Licensing is also one of those rare beasts of a good way to raise taxes.
What needs to happen is that the broadcast spectrum is auctioned on a regular basis, lets find out how much people really do value the BBC – accompanies by a voluntary licence fee.
NBC doesn’t have a license. Its affiliates do.
Aluminium was once a scarce resource BiND.
I’m no tech but there has to be some way to boost what can be transmitted.
And if not then the courts would have to decide. Again private arbitration would be better than the state’s gang.
“I’m no tech but there has to be some way to boost what can be transmitted”
Yup, it’s called the internet. I can’t see terrestrial broadcast TV lasting another decade.
I’ve been spluttering about Trinity Mirror but nobody listens.
Ayn Rand dealt with all this in back in 1964 with The Property Status of Airwaves. She argued for pretty much the same as Ecks. And she explained why BiND’s argument about scarcity is wrong.
Which broadcaster is Trinity Mirror trying to acquire?
Fatty, john77’s comment was so far above your head that you couldn’t even see the vapour trail.
It’s both amazing and unsurprising as to how many of the journalists who are hyperventilating over Trump’s tweet had nothing to say when Obama ‘declared war’ on Fox and Rupert Murdoch.
Cunts, every last one ’em.
The broadcasters get to broadcast pretty much whatever they want based on the assumption that they act at least to some extent in the public interest, however that is defined. It’s a case of “we won’t regulate you if you don’t do anything that demands regulation”. It hasn’t really worked all that well but it’s always looked better than the alternative. But now the main national US broadcasters are so monolithically left-wing that they present a real menace.
I’d mandate that all licenses are good for, say, twenty years and then they lapse, to be re-auctioned. If Leftscum are worried about media concentration, how could they possibly object?
PST,
That link is wrong, is this page.