Rep. Randy Fine, R-Fla., said the decision by ABC, NBC, and CNN to skip President Donald Trump's prime-time address on election security raises the question of whether the broadcast networks should keep the public licenses that give them free access to the airwaves, telling Newsmax on Saturday that the pattern of "picking and choosing" which presidential speeches to carry live is "very problematic."

Fine's comments on "Saturday Report" came two days after Trump delivered a prime-time speech in the White House East Room calling for the revocation of ABC and NBC's broadcast licenses after both networks declined to air the address on their flagship channels.

ABC, NBC and CNN ran the speech only on their streaming services, while Fox and CBS aired it on linear television, with CBS cutting away before it ended.

The Florida Republican, who joined the House Foreign Affairs Committee last year, drew a distinction between cable outlets and the over-the-air broadcasters that hold federal licenses.

"Yeah, I think it's very troubling," Fine said. "What makes a broadcast network different is they have an asset that has been provided to them by the public, access to the public airwaves. That's something, for example, that Newsmax doesn't have. There's no free way to get it over the air that they've been given. You guys have been given no bandwidth."

Fine argued that the networks are applying an inconsistent standard. He pointed to their live coverage of former President Joe Biden's September 2022 speech at Independence Hall in Philadelphia, in which Biden warned that Trump and his "MAGA Republican" allies posed a threat to democracy.

"And if the media, if broadcast networks are going to start to pick and choose if they're going to broadcast Joe Biden's insane speech that he gave in Philadelphia, where it looked like a speech in front of the SS or something, and they're going to broadcast that live, but they're not going to broadcast the president?" Fine asked.

"That kind of picking and choosing is very problematic. And I think it begs the question of whether they should have access to these public broadcast licenses."

Trump made the same argument from the White House Thursday night, telling viewers the networks' refusal should mean "a revocation of their licenses."

The FCC, chaired by Trump appointee Brendan Carr, has already put ABC's eight owned-and-operated stations under early license review.

The president does not have the authority to revoke broadcast licenses, which are issued by the FCC to individual broadcast stations rather than networks. Any move to revoke a station's license would face steep legal barriers.

Former FCC Chair Jessica Rosenworcel said in 2024 that the commission "does not and will not revoke licenses for broadcast stations simply because a political candidate disagrees with or dislikes content or coverage," and prior court rulings have blocked similar attempts on First Amendment grounds.

The networks framed their decisions as editorial judgments about a speech the White House said would include major revelations about foreign election interference. Trump's remarks alleged "shocking vulnerabilities" in U.S. election infrastructure and pressed the Senate to pass the SAVE America Act but, according to a FactCheck.org review, stopped short of producing evidence of widespread fraud.

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