Disney’s TV licenses

Pro-Trump groups to tell Brendan Carr to yank Disney’s TV licenses

The requests inject claims of political bias into a process that will determine if Disney keeps its lucrative licenses.

By John Hendel

Conservative groups are preparing to urge the Federal Communications Commission to revoke Disney’s broadcast television licenses, two representatives told POLITICO — a step that would build on agency Chair Brendan Carr’s already unprecedented efforts to punish President Donald Trump’s perceived critics in the media.

The petitioners are expected to include a lawyer leading the conservative Center for American Rights who filed complaints against NBC’s “Saturday Night Live” and CBS’ “60 Minutes” about alleged favoritism toward Kamala Harris during the 2024 presidential campaign. Carr immediately revived those complaints once he assumed the gavel, kick-starting a year and a half of threats and investigations that have left the media industry on edge.

The new petitions will heighten the stakes, injecting politically charged issues such as alleged partisan bias into the FCC’s decision on whether Disney should keep its lucrative licenses.

Carr this spring took the highly unusual step of calling in the licenses for all eight Disney-owned ABC TV stations for renewal years ahead of schedule, citing allegations that the entertainment and media giant had failed to cooperate with an investigation into its diversity, equity and inclusion programs. The early scrutiny jeopardizes Disney’s control over its flagship stations in New York City and Los Angeles, as well other major markets such as Chicago, Houston and Philadelphia — and puts other broadcasters on notice that their licenses also may not be secure.

With the new petitions, the review is “no longer only about DEI,” said the Center for American Rights leader, Daniel Suhr, in an interview with POLITICO. “It is now about the complete record of ABC’s management of these stations.”

ABC has denounced the early license review, telling the agency last month that Carr’s action serves “no legitimate purpose” and is an “effort to suppress speech under the guise of bureaucratic process” — echoing critics who charge that the FCC chief is acting at Trump’s behest. The network declined to comment on the conservatives’ petitions but has vigorously defended its qualifications to hold the eight licenses.

The FCC defended its handling of Disney, telling POLITICO that it “will follow the facts and the law wherever they go. Broadcasters have unique public interest obligations, and Congress has tasked the FCC with enforcing those regulations.”

Suhr said the review fulfills Carr’s attempt to hold broadcasters to account, as the chair outlined in a reminder to broadcasters in May about their obligation to act in the “public interest.” Carr has argued he’s enforcing that mandate, which Congress wrote into law nearly a century ago.

The GOP petitions include one filed last week and at least two expected Monday, according to those organizations. Monday marks the deadline to file these petitions to deny, and ABC and its allies will have until July 29 to object.

Trump routinely calls for removing the licenses of TV outlets he finds objectionable, including NBC for its reporting on the U.S. nuclear arsenal, CBS for allegedly behaving like “a dishonest Political Operative,” and others that “have evening shows and all they do is hit Trump.” His targets at ABC have included late-night comedian Jimmy Kimmel, daytime talk show “The View” and political correspondent George Stephanopoulos.

The FCC chair during Trump’s first term, Ajit Pai, refused to follow up on those types of threats, saying in a 2017 speech that “I believe in the First Amendment.” But Carr has been more willing to open investigations and take other action to scrutinize the broadcasters’ content, citing long-unenforced FCC rules that forbid “news distortion” and require equal airtime for opposing political candidates.

Carr has said the FCC has yet to make a decision on Disney’s licenses, a point he reiterated to reporters Thursday — but also made clear that revoking them is on the table.

“If it goes towards a hearing designation order, if it goes towards license revocation, if that’s where the facts take us, great,” Carr told CNBC last month. “If not, then that’s OK, too.”

Yanking Disney’s licenses would be nearly unprecedented. The last time the FCC revoked a license was in the 1980s over claims that an owner of several radio and TV stations had overbilled advertisers and filed false financial statements, among other signs of poor “character.”

The petitions from the conservative groups could give Carr leverage to expand the Disney licensing review into issues such as alleged political bias at ABC, going well beyond the FCC’s initial questions about whether the network’s diversity practices amount to discrimination.

The Media Research Center, a watchdog group devoted to countering perceived liberal bias, also plans to file a petition Monday urging the commission to deny Disney’s ABC license renewal, a spokesperson confirmed to POLITICO. The Article III Project, a legal organization led by Trump ally Mike Davis, submitted an early petition to deny last week over Disney’s diversity initiatives.

Suhr said his petition will be particularly wide-ranging, including what he calls the “hyper-partisan” nature of ABC shows, from Kimmel’s late-night program to “The View,” which he sees at odds with the company’s claimed exemptions to the FCC’s equal time rule. (Only “bona fide” news interviews are exempt from the equal time requirement, Carr has said.)

His petition will also raise concern that Disney has lacked candor in its dealings with the commission, citing FCC concerns about the adequacy of its diversity investigation responses and, last week, complaints that the agency has engaged in “misinformation” in trying to solicit public support.

Suhr will also urge the FCC to look at whether ABC has unduly limited how much flexibility its more than 200 affiliate stations have in preempting the network’s national programming. Many of those stations are owned by companies such as Sinclair and Nexstar, both of which preempted Kimmel’s late-night show last year amid a furor over his remarks on the killing of conservative activist Charlie Kirk.

Carr has called for enhancing stations’ power to preempt programming, suggesting that doing so makes local stations more responsive to their communities.

ABC has said it submitted thousands of pages in response to the diversity probe, and it has asked viewers to weigh in to oppose the FCC review. More than 45,000 filings now fill the early license renewal docket, including from community groups praising the network’s local TV stations.

Some of Carr’s critics say this dispute is exactly the regulatory theater the FCC chair invited — and intended to complicate Disney’s business.

“I mean, does Brendan Carr think we’re stupid?” John Bergmayer, legal director of the liberal-leaning consumer advocacy group Public Knowledge, told POLITICO. “He can’t just go around basically promising retribution against Disney and ABC, and pre-deciding the case, and opening up these pretextual investigations … and somehow expect us to say, ‘Oh, yes, I believe that this is really just about your compliance with this technical statute.’”

The licensing review has inflamed tensions among Carr’s critics, including some members of the GOP. The National Association of Broadcasters has warned that Carr’s move “creates significant uncertainty for all broadcasters,” potentially undoing the reliability embedded for decades in the agency’s licensing process.

In an unusual move, two liberal-leaning groups called Frequency Forward and the Media Action Center also filed a “petition to deny” on Friday. They said they want the FCC to “grant Disney’s renewal applications immediately, without any agreement or conditions,” but argue that filing now gives them ability to challenge the agency in court if the agency revokes the licenses or engages in a “backroom settlement” to resolve the fight.

Democratic FCC Commissioner Anna Gomez has also repeatedly raised concerns about the early license scrutiny.

“It is so clear that this early license renewal is being done to pressure Disney,” Gomez told reporters Thursday. “This whole diversity, equity and inclusion investigation is a pretext.”