The network says the loss of its TV licenses would send a message to all media: “Accommodate the Administration’s view of what news coverage should look like or pay the price.”
ABC accused Federal Communications Commission Chair Brendan Carr of “attempted censorship” in a regulatory filing posted Thursday, saying the agency is creating a potential chilling effect across the media by helping President Donald Trump attack his perceived adversaries.
“The retaliation against ABC is a signal to every media company in the country: accommodate the Administration’s view of what news coverage should look like or pay the price,” the Disney-owned television network wrote, in its sharpest response yet to the potential loss of its eight TV broadcasting licenses.“Across the government, regulatory and contracting carrots and sticks have been trained on other disfavored speakers,” ABC’s lawyers added in the 119-page filing. “The tools vary; the objective does not: a media industry too fearful of official reprisal to report the news freely.”
Carr has repeatedly rejected accusations of censorship while defending his efforts to rein in what he calls abusive, politically motivated behavior by licensed TV broadcasters. “I don’t view the FCC as the speech police,” he told POLITICO this week for an upcoming episode of the podcast “The Conversation.”
In its filing, ABC pointed to an outpouring of support it has received in more than 152,000 comments in the agency’s license review, as well as recent warnings from conservative Supreme Court Justice Neil Gorsuch, Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) and various pro-free-market organizations about the dangers of a politically motivated FCC. Those include letters from a bipartisan group of former FCC leaders, community and advocacy groups and lawmakers of both parties.
“The Commission’s attempted censorship of ABC has attracted condemnation across the political aisle,” the network wrote.
ABC’s response is the latest pressure point in its war with Carr, who in April took the unconventional step of calling up all eight Disney-owned TV stations for an early license review. While Carr has said the move grew out of an agency investigation into Disney’s hiring practices, pro-Trump groups like the Center for American Rights and Media Research Center in June asked the agency to deny the license renewals.
Those groups raised a host of complaints about ABC, including about the politics of the company’s programming.
Trump upped the ante this month when he used a live television address about election security to call on both ABC and NBC to lose their broadcasting licenses, accusing both networks of “fraud” for declining to air the speech.
A week later, Carr said the issue would likely come up in the ABC license review and that broadcasters should generally air key primetime addresses from the president.ABC cited that flap in its newest filing, along with various other threats Trump has made over the years against the network’s licenses.
“There is no question why the Commission is singling out these eight stations,” the network wrote. “Each is owned by ABC, and the Administration has openly and repeatedly called for the revocation of ABC’s licenses, because it dislikes the content and viewpoints expressed on ABC network programs.”
ABC called on the FCC to dismiss the conservative petitions to deny the licenses, saying they lack merit and delve into dicey territory for the agency. “The Commission cannot rest a renewal decision on the content of a station’s programming,” it added. “Nor may it condition renewal on whether a broadcaster gave sufficient airtime to particular viewpoints, covered particular stories, featured particular guests, adopted particular interview formats, or framed public issues in a particular manner.”
The fight comes amid a broader debate over Carr’s media agenda, which has featured investigations and criticisms of outlets’ programming decisions and an explicit desire to reduce the power and influence of the national networks over their affiliated TV stations.
ABC has responded to Carr by bringing on veteran litigators such as Republican former U.S. Solicitor General Paul Clement and, in the latest filing, adding Beth Wilkinson, a trial lawyer who is a founding partner of Wilkinson Stekloff.
The network is separately defending its daytime show “The View” in another proceeding over whether its interviews count as “bona fide news,” exempting it from the FCC’s requirements for broadcasters to offer equal time to opposing political candidates. Carr has said he’s reviving enforcement of that rule, after decades of the agency giving a de-facto pass to late-night and daytime television talk shows.
The FCC’s broad legal authority to ensure that broadcasters act in the “public interest” has been backed by decades of Supreme Court decisions — but it’s lately attracted scrutiny from some conservatives who warn that it might be too much power for appointed bureaucrats to have.
Those include Gorsuch, who used the court’s June decision striking down the autonomy of so-called independent agencies to muse aloud about the potential abuses of bodies such as the FCC. “A business out of favor with the party in control of the White House might be able to stave off an FCC investigation,” Gorsuch wrote in his concurring opinion to that ruling.
ABC’s new filing also links to remarks last September by Cruz, who chairs the Senate Commerce Committee that oversees the FCC. “I think it is unbelievably dangerous for [the] government to put itself in the position of saying, ‘We’re going to decide what speech we like and what we don’t, and we’re going to threaten to take you off-air if we don’t like what you’re saying,” the Texas senator said on his podcast at the time, during a dispute between the network and Carr over late-night host Jimmy Kimmel.
Carr has disputed accusations that the license review is politically motivated, including in his podcast interview this week with POLITICO.
In the interview, he blamed the need to review Disney’s licenses on a lack of candor the network showed in responding to the FCC’s diversity investigation, which began last year.
“The Disney case is about evidence coming to light — we haven’t made a final decision yet — that they had been discriminating inside the company based on race and gender, in terms of hiring, promoting, compensation, workplace opportunities,” Carr said this week. “If that all ends up being true, based on all the evidence that Disney gets to put in, that’s a very concerning development — and it does raise fundamental questions about fitness to have a license.”
source : https://www.politico.com/news/2026/07/3 ... p-01016992