US President Donald Trump delivered a 25-minute speech claiming that China had interfered in American elections. For that purpose he declassified intelligence material. The most interesting thing in the whole story is not what he said - it is that half of America's television networks refused to carry it at all.

The White House requested a live broadcast from the national networks - a move that is rare in itself. NBC and ABC declined to interrupt their evening programming. CNN also decided against airing it live. Trump's answer was that those networks should have their licences stripped, because, as he said without offering a shred of evidence, they „know how corrupt our system is and don't want to expose it”. In passing, he also claimed the networks „pay nothing” for the use of the public airwaves.

What exactly he claimed, and what the documents say

Trump stated that China illegally obtained 220 million records on American voters - names, addresses and other data from voter registration. He also accused members of the intelligence community of deliberately concealing the scale of Chinese activity.

The problem is that his claims sit in direct contradiction to the undisclosed 2021 assessment by the US intelligence community, which found no indication whatsoever that any foreign actor attempted to alter „any technical aspect” of the 2020 vote - not the registrations, not the ballots, not the count, not the results. That assessment was overseen by John Ratcliffe, at the time his own Director of National Intelligence, and today the director of the CIA. His own man, in other words.

More interesting still: part of the documents he released show precisely the opposite of what he claims. One CIA document, prepared last month, did not concern American elections at all - it concerned Venezuelan ones. Another states it „would be difficult to manipulate vote-counting systems on a scale large enough to threaten election results”. A third CIA document details Chinese espionage efforts aimed at the Biden campaign, but notes that Beijing „currently has no intention of covertly interfering in an attempt to influence the electoral outcome”.

A newsroom dilemma as old as the profession

Network executives agonised over it for hours. The dilemma was simple and brutal: on one side the traditional weight of a presidential address, on the other the risk of handing him unfiltered airtime to deny election results. As one executive put it - „it's not 1974 any more. There are many ways to report”.

CBS and Fox carried it. CBS wrapped the speech in fact-checking before and immediately after. Even so, Democratic senator Mark Warner criticised them for exactly that programming: „It's on you and every responsible journalist to challenge these untruths.” MSNBC carried around 15 minutes before cutting away for analysis. Host Chris Hayes said that responding to the speech was „something like arguing with a man in a basement who claims to be Jesus Christ”.

Who hands out the licence to whom

This is where the story gets greasy. Contrary to Trump's claims, the government does not issue licences to national networks - it issues them to local stations. But the FCC, the regulator now aligned with him, is actively investigating the parent companies of ABC and NBC, and is challenging licences for eight local ABC stations, after years of public pressure.

And CBS? Its owner Paramount has built close ties with the administration over the past year, and is currently trying to buy Warner Bros Discovery - CNN's parent company. A coalition of 12 Democratic state attorneys general is trying to block that sale. Guess which network carried the speech and which did not.

The Balkans knows this scene

Chinese embassy spokesman Liu Zhang said China „has never interfered and will never interfere” in American presidential elections. Senator Warner, vice-chair of the Senate intelligence committee, was blunter: the intelligence agencies agreed unanimously that China did not try to change a single vote in 2020.

Does any of this ring a bell? A ruling set insisting its elections were stolen. A regulator that suddenly takes an interest in the licences of precisely those outlets that will not carry the message. An outlet whose owner has business pending before the same government - and which, lo and behold, carries it. This is not exotica from the far side of the ocean. This is machinery that reads perfectly well without translation.

The only difference is that over there, two executives can still spend hours agonising over whether to interrupt prime time. That hesitation is all that stands between journalism and a stenography service. How long will it hold?