White House Denounces ABC News for ‘Hoaxes and Lies’ in Extraordinary Statement After Trump Says Network Should Lose Its License

President Trump and the White House doubled down on their displeasure with ABC News on Wednesday, issuing an extraordinary statement enumerating what they say was the legacy news operation’s “long, rich tradition of peddling lies, conspiracies, and outright opinion thinly veiled as fact.”The official denunciation was issued shortly after the president said he thought the network should lose its broadcast license. Mr. Trump’s relationship with ABC News has grown increasingly contentious in recent months. On Tuesday, the president said that the chairman of the Federal Communications Commission, Brendan Carr, should “look at” revoking the network’s broadcast license. The comment came after ABC’s chief White House correspondent, Mary Bruce, asked the president why he is waiting on Congress to release the Epstein files.Mr. Trump was angered by several questions from Ms. Bruce in addition to her query about Epstein. Ms. Bruce also asked Saudi Arabia’s crown prince, Mohamed bin Salman, who was sitting next to Mr. Trump in the Oval Office, about the murder of the Washington Post columnist Jamal Khashoggi. On Wednesday, the White House kept up the barrage, releasing a statement with the subject, “ABC ‘News’ Is Fake News.”“ABC ‘News’ is not journalism — it’s a Democrat spin operation masquerading as a broadcast network,” the White House statement said. “The network’s longstanding commitment to hoaxes, character assassinations, and outright fiction targeting only one side of the political aisle is a deliberate deception to wage war on President Trump and the millions of Americans who elected him to multiple terms.”Backing up these assertions were 17 incidents that the White House offered as evidence for its statement, dating back to 2017 when ABC News suspended its chief investigative correspondent, Brian Ross, for a “serious error” in his reporting when he reported that Mr. Trump told his former national security adviser, Michael Flynn, to contact the Russian government during the 2016 campaign. The White House noted that a veteran ABC News correspondent, David Wright, was suspended in 2020 after he stated, “I consider myself a socialist.”Besides the suspensions, the White House highlighted allegations of bias against one of the network’s star anchors and a former top Clinton aide, George Stephanopoulos, whom the statement called a “wannabe ‘journalist.’”Specifically, it noted that in 2020, Mr. Stephanopoulos declined to ask President Biden about his son’s “infamous laptop or the swirling allegations of impropriety.” In 2024, Mr. Stephanopoulos falsely and repeatedly stated that Mr. Trump had been “found liable for rape,” which led to the president suing ABC for defamation. ABC’s parent company, Disney, paid $16 million to settle the lawsuit in December and issued a statement of regret. The White House noted that a study from the conservative media watchdog, NewsBusters, found that ABC’s coverage of his cabinet nominees was 90 percent negative. Meanwhile, the network cast the president’s policies as a form of “retribution, and “attack on veterans,” and an attempt to benefit the “wealthiest Americans.”The statement also pointed out that ABC fired a veteran correspondent, Terry Moran, after he said Mr. Trump and a top White House adviser, Stephen Miller, were “world-class hater[s].”ABC News did not respond to the Sun’s request for comment by the time of publication. The increased criticism of ABC News comes as Mr. Trump has sought to punish news outlets for coverage he does not like and feels is defamatory. The president has a series of defamation lawsuits pending against several news outlets, including the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times. He is also expected to file a defamation lawsuit against the BBC for as much as $5 billion for a misleading edit of his speech on January 6, 2021. While Mr. Trump has sought to extract hefty sums for outlets he feels have defamed him, Mr. Carr has sought to wield his agency’s authority to clean up what he feels is a liberal bias at broadcast networks.Mr. Carr has noted that broadcast networks are supposed to abide by the FCC’s “public interest” requirement. In an interview with NewsBusters, the chairman said broadcast networks are required by federal law to “serve the public interest, which means looking out for the interest of the local community.”“You can’t run a narrow partisan circus and ultimately be holding a broadcast license. You can do that on cable, you can do that on a podcast, but licensed broadcast TV is just fundamentally different,” he said. Broadcast licenses are not sacred cows. If you think there’s nothing you can do to lose a license, then it’s not a license. That’s called a property right … I’m very open to the idea that there’s broadcasters out there that may very well end up losing their licenses.”While Mr. Trump has turned up the pressure on ABC News, Mr. Carr has praised CBS News, which was acquired by Skydance in August. The new owner of CBS News, David Ellison – the son of the world’s second richest man and a Trump supporter, Larry Ellison – has sought to address allegations of bias at the Tiffany Network by taking steps such as installing a new, pro-Israel and anti-woke editor-in-chief, Bari Weiss. Last week, Mr. Carr told National Review, “When CBS’s transaction came before the FCC, we put some conditions in place where they agreed to return to more fact-based, unbiased reporting.”“And I’m pleased that they are living up to that standard,” he said.

White House Denounces ABC News for ‘Hoaxes and Lies’ in Extraordinary Statement After Trump Says Network Should Lose Its License

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