Trump threatens to report journalist Kristen Welker to broadcast regulator

United States President Donald Trump notes he will report a prominent NBC television journalist to the federal agency in charge of regulating broadcast news outlets for "rebuke or punishment".

Key points

• Welker hosted the 2020 presidential election debate between Trump and former President Joe Biden and at present hosts NBC's weekly news programme Meet the Press.
• News media freedom groups like the Committee to Protect Journalists have criticised the Trump administration for targeting critical media.
• "Because of this purposeful inaccuracy, she will be reported to the FCC, " the Federal Communications Commission, he remarked.
• Your elections are crooked, and you're crooked, and Meet the Press is crooked and so is ABC and CBS and CNN.
• "How can anyone be allowed to say this, working for freely given public airwaves?" Trump wrote.

In a post on Truth Social on Sunday, Trump took matter with Kristen Welker's characterisation of his endorsements of electoral candidates as having "mixed results" in the primaries leading up to November's elections.

"How can anyone be allowed to say this, working for freely given public airwaves?" Trump wrote. He additionally posted, without any attribution of where he secured the data, a chart showing 98 percent of the candidates he endorsed had won their elections.

In June, Welker had a one-on-one interview with Trump that concluded 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 remarked 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 employ the FCC to target what he states 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 remarked was "retaliation" against it. ABC remarked the FCC was seeking "a media industry too fearful of official reprisal to report the news freely".

For context, 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 created concerning her.

President Trump has additionally filed a number of multibillion-dollar civil lawsuits against news outlets alleging defamation. Last year, he filed a $10bn lawsuit against the BBC. It he remarked unfairly edited a clip of him speaking just before his supporters stormed the US Capitol on January 6, 2021, to produce it seem like he had pressed violence.

Trump sued The New York Times for $15bn and The Wall Street Journal for $10bn, alleging defamation over reporting on problems 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.

Notably, the warning from Trump additionally 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 remarked agents from the FBI demonstrated up at the home of one of its reporters in February to deliver a subpoena seeking cooperation for an investigation into a story that made public how a secret US Navy SEALs mission in North Korea had concluded up with them opening fire on a North Korean boat.

In July, the US Department of Justice additionally tried to subpoena three other journalists from the newspaper after they noted on security reservations 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 additionally been subpoenaed in recent months for national security coverage, including for reporting on internal Pentagon warnings concerning 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, remarked the US has fallen to a "historic low" in its annual global press freedom rankings, dropping from 57th in the world to 64th.

In short, trump threatens to report journalist Kristen Welker to broadcast regulator is the central thread here, and readers can expect follow-up reporting as the picture becomes clearer.