ABC is officially calling on the Federal Communications Commission to drop its “extraordinary and unprecedented” proceeding to call in the Disney-owned network’s stations for an early broadcast license renewal.
The network has responded to the Brendan Carr-led agency in a new filing Thursday, bringing on veteran litigator Beth Wilkinson to its legal team (Wilkinson also recently signed on to represent Paramount in its antitrust suit filed by state AGs).
To recap: The FCC called ABC’s eight broadcast licenses in for an early renewal earlier this year, which the network did “under protest.” Ostensibly the decision was about parent company Disney’s DEI policies, though the network noted that just before calling in the licenses, the administration had called for it to take action against late night host Jimmy Kimmel over a joke he made on his program.
The FCC also launched a separate proceeding examining The View, which it argues is not a “bona fide” news program and thus not exempt from FCC equal opportunity rules. ABC responded to that proceeding earlier this month, though in its new filing it says that the FCC “now appears poised to find that The View must provide equal opportunities to all legally qualified political candidates if it interviews one candidate on the show, which would represent a reversal of decades of agency precedent.”
After the FCC’s actions, ABC launched an on-air campaign, urging public support for both its station licenses, and The View. Thursday’s filing notes that more than 150,000 comments have been filed, overwhelmingly in support of ABC, including from Republicans and free market organizations, as well as a bipartisan group of former FCC commissioners and officials (interestingly, ABC notes that it used Anthropic’s Claude and OpenAI’s Codex to evaluate the comments, with human reviewers evaluating a random sample to ensure they were accurate).
“For the first time in history, the Federal Communications Commission has ordered an entire group of local television stations commonly owned with a broadcast network to undergo simultaneous license renewal proceedings well before their current licenses expire,” ABC writes in its new filing. “That makes these proceedings extraordinary and unprecedented. There is no question why the Commission is singling out these eight stations: 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.”
The filing, which you can read here, proceeds to address each of the FCC’s complaints (as well as those filed by some outside interest groups, making the argument that the proceeding must be dismissed. ABC argues that the effort by the FCC is in fact an opening salvo, a warning shot to other media companies.
“Nor was the message meant for ABC alone. 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 filing states. “Across the government, regulatory and contracting carrots and sticks have been trained on other disfavored speakers. The tools vary; the objective does not: a media industry too fearful of official reprisal to report the news freely.”
