United States President Donald Trump says he will report a prominent NBC television journalist to the federal agency in charge of regulating broadcast news outlets for “rebuke or punishment”.
In a post on Truth Social on Sunday, Trump took issue with Kristen Welker’s characterisation of his endorsements of electoral candidates as having “mixed results” in the primaries leading up to November’s elections.
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“How can anyone be allowed to say this, working for freely given public airwaves?” Trump wrote. He also posted, without any attribution of where he got the data, a chart showing 98 percent of the candidates he endorsed had won their elections.
“Because of this purposeful inaccuracy, she will be reported to the FCC,” the Federal Communications Commission, he said.
Welker hosted the 2020 presidential election debate between Trump and former President Joe Biden and currently hosts NBC’s weekly news programme Meet the Press.
‘Crooked networks’
In June, Welker had a one-on-one interview with Trump that ended in a heated exchange as she pressed the Republican president on continuing to claim the Democratic Party had cheated in the 2020 presidential election, in which Biden defeated Trump.
“Your elections are crooked, and you’re crooked, and Meet the Press is crooked and so is ABC and CBS and CNN. You’re one-sided crooked networks,” Trump said shortly before pulling off his microphone and leaving the interview.
Trump, who has long had a tumultuous relationship with those US television news networks, has increasingly threatened to use the FCC to target what he says is false news.
This month, ABC News’s owner, Disney, sued the FCC, saying the agency was conducting an early licence review of eight of the network’s stations, a move that it said was “retaliation” against it. ABC said the FCC was seeking “a media industry too fearful of official reprisal to report the news freely”.
The review followed a row between the network and the FCC after Trump and his wife Melania called on it to fire late-night TV host Jimmy Kimmel over a joke he had made about her.
President Trump has also filed several multibillion-dollar civil lawsuits against news outlets alleging defamation. Last year, he filed a $10bn lawsuit against the BBC, which he said unfairly edited a clip of him speaking just before his supporters stormed the US Capitol on January 6, 2021, to make it seem like he had called for violence.
Trump sued The New York Times for $15bn and The Wall Street Journal for $10bn, alleging defamation over reporting on issues such as how he amassed his wealth and his relationship to convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein. A judge threw out the case against The Wall Street Journal. Trump refiled the case against The New York Times after a judge dismissed the first complaint against the newspaper last year.
Attempts to compel reporters to reveal sources
The warning from Trump also comes as his administration has taken the rare step of using the courts to try to pressure journalists into giving up confidential sources for stories that have pointed out wrongdoing.
This month, The New York Times said agents from the FBI showed up at the home of one of its reporters in February to deliver a subpoena seeking cooperation for an investigation into a story that revealed how a secret US Navy SEALs mission in North Korea had ended up with them opening fire on a North Korean boat.
In July, the US Department of Justice also tried to subpoena three other journalists from the newspaper after they reported on security concerns with the president’s new Air Force One jet. Investigators were seeking phone records of the journalists but withdrew the requests after a federal judge upbraided the tactic in court, saying they were violating the First Amendment, a provision in the US Constitution that protects freedom of the press.
Reporters at The Wall Street Journal and The Washington Post have also been subpoenaed in recent months for national security coverage, including for reporting on internal Pentagon warnings about the US-Israel war on Iran.
News media freedom groups like the Committee to Protect Journalists have criticised the Trump administration for targeting critical media. In April, the group Reporters Sans Frontieres, or Reporters Without Borders, said the US has fallen to a “historic low” in its annual global press freedom rankings, dropping from 57th in the world to 64th.
Trump calls on FCC to punish ‘Meet the Press’ moderator Kristen Welker
President Trump lashed out Sunday at NBC’s “Meet the Press” moderator Kristen Welker, calling on the Federal Communications Commission to punish her over comments she made about the president’s record in endorsing primary candidates.
“Kristen Welker, the Unpopular ‘Hostess’ of the once great Meet the Press, now considered Meet the Fake Press, just stated that Donald Trump has ‘mixed results’ on his Endorsements of Candidates, when the recent WINS of Darline Graham and Mike Mazzei, stand at 100% for the U.S. Senate, and 98% for the U.S. House, recently and over the longterm,” Trump wrote on Truth Social.
Trump actually endorsed Mazzei in the Oklahoma governor’s race, not a congressional seat.
“How can anyone be allowed to say this, working for freely given Public Airwaves?” Trump added. “Because of this purposeful inaccuracy, she will be reported to the FCC for rebuke or punishment.”
Welker was previewing Sunday’s edition of “Meet the Press” on NBC’s Washington station WRC when she made the remarks about Trump’s endorsements.
“He’s going to loom large over these midterms,” Welker said. “There’s no doubt about that. He, of course, has endorsed a slate of candidates in the primaries. He’s had some mixed results, but most recently, his pick of Senator Darline Graham, of course, the sister of the late Senator Lindsey Graham, was successful in her primary battle, so now she takes on Dr. Annie Andrews in South Carolina.”
In a statement, NBC News expressed its support for Welker. “Kristen is one of the best in the business and we stand by her,” a representative said in a statement.
FCC Chairman Brendan Carr has shown a willingness to use his agency’s levers to go after broadcast media outlets Trump deems unfriendly. In April, he called for an early review of the TV station licenses held by ABC, claiming the company’s diversity and inclusion policies are in violation of federal anti-discrimination laws.
ABC has filed a lawsuit against the FCC to block the review, saying it was motivated by Trump’s animus toward the late-night host Jimmy Kimmel.
Going after Welker for an anodyne analysis that did not match the president’s perception of his endorsement results would be a stretch, according to the FCC’s own guidelines.
“The FCC’s authority to take action on complaints about the accuracy or bias of news networks, stations, reporters or commentators in how they cover — or sometimes opt to not cover — events is narrow,” according to the FCC website. “The agency is prohibited by law from engaging in censorship or infringing on First Amendment rights of the press.”
Anna Gomez, the lone Democratic member of the FCC, said Trump’s comments are dangerous and also demonstrate a fundamental lack of understanding of the agency’s role.
“As I’ve said many times, the FCC has no authority to punish journalists this administration doesn’t like,” Gomez wrote on the social platform X. “These threats to press freedom are dangerous. They undermine the foundation of our democracy, and they have no place in it.”
Trump is clearly sensitive about critiques of his endorsement powers. On Friday, Bill Maher did a lengthy segment on his show “Real Time,” apologizing to the president for having said “almost none” of his endorsed candidates are winning their primaries. Maher noted that out of 260 candidates endorsed by Trump, only nine have lost. Maher noted that many of those candidates were heavy favorites to win but agreed that his statement was not accurate.
Maher also gave a strong indication that Trump had texted him to express his unhappiness over his comments.
But “Real Time” is on cable and streaming where the FCC has no say on programming content. The agency regulates broadcast channels that are delivered over the public airwaves.
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Trump threatens to report journalist Kristen Welker to broadcast regulator | Donald Trump News
The Federal Communications Commission under Trump has tried to target news outlets for spreading ‘fake’ news.
Published On 30 Aug 202630 Aug 2026
United States President Donald Trump says he will report a prominent NBC television journalist to the federal agency in charge of regulating broadcast news outlets for “rebuke or punishment”.
In a post on Truth Social on Sunday, Trump took issue with Kristen Welker’s characterisation of his endorsements of electoral candidates as having “mixed results” in the primaries leading up to November’s elections.
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list of 3 itemsend of list
“How can anyone be allowed to say this, working for freely given public airwaves?” Trump wrote. He also posted, without any attribution of where he got the data, a chart showing 98 percent of the candidates he endorsed had won their elections.
“Because of this purposeful inaccuracy, she will be reported to the FCC,” the Federal Communications Commission, he said.
Welker hosted the 2020 presidential election debate between Trump and former President Joe Biden and currently hosts NBC’s weekly news programme Meet the Press.
‘Crooked networks’
In June, Welker had a one-on-one interview with Trump that ended in a heated exchange as she pressed the Republican president on continuing to claim the Democratic Party had cheated in the 2020 presidential election, in which Biden defeated Trump.
“Your elections are crooked, and you’re crooked, and Meet the Press is crooked and so is ABC and CBS and CNN. You’re one-sided crooked networks,” Trump said shortly before pulling off his microphone and leaving the interview.
Trump, who has long had a tumultuous relationship with those US television news networks, has increasingly threatened to use the FCC to target what he says is false news.
This month, ABC News’s owner, Disney, sued the FCC, saying the agency was conducting an early licence review of eight of the network’s stations, a move that it said was “retaliation” against it. ABC said the FCC was seeking “a media industry too fearful of official reprisal to report the news freely”.
The review followed a row between the network and the FCC after Trump and his wife Melania called on it to fire late-night TV host Jimmy Kimmel over a joke he had made about her.
President Trump has also filed several multibillion-dollar civil lawsuits against news outlets alleging defamation. Last year, he filed a $10bn lawsuit against the BBC, which he said unfairly edited a clip of him speaking just before his supporters stormed the US Capitol on January 6, 2021, to make it seem like he had called for violence.
Trump sued The New York Times for $15bn and The Wall Street Journal for $10bn, alleging defamation over reporting on issues such as how he amassed his wealth and his relationship to convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein. A judge threw out the case against The Wall Street Journal. Trump refiled the case against The New York Times after a judge dismissed the first complaint against the newspaper last year.
Attempts to compel reporters to reveal sources
The warning from Trump also comes as his administration has taken the rare step of using the courts to try to pressure journalists into giving up confidential sources for stories that have pointed out wrongdoing.
This month, The New York Times said agents from the FBI showed up at the home of one of its reporters in February to deliver a subpoena seeking cooperation for an investigation into a story that revealed how a secret US Navy SEALs mission in North Korea had ended up with them opening fire on a North Korean boat.
In July, the US Department of Justice also tried to subpoena three other journalists from the newspaper after they reported on security concerns with the president’s new Air Force One jet. Investigators were seeking phone records of the journalists but withdrew the requests after a federal judge upbraided the tactic in court, saying they were violating the First Amendment, a provision in the US Constitution that protects freedom of the press.
Reporters at The Wall Street Journal and The Washington Post have also been subpoenaed in recent months for national security coverage, including for reporting on internal Pentagon warnings about the US-Israel war on Iran.
News media freedom groups like the Committee to Protect Journalists have criticised the Trump administration for targeting critical media. In April, the group Reporters Sans Frontieres, or Reporters Without Borders, said the US has fallen to a “historic low” in its annual global press freedom rankings, dropping from 57th in the world to 64th.
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