Disney today sued the Federal Communications Commission and FCC Chairman Brendan Carr in a lawsuit that aims to stop what it called a “campaign of censorship” waged by the Trump administration against ABC. Disney, ABC, and the eight broadcast stations they own filed a complaint in US District Court for the District of Columbia. They also submitted a motion for a temporary restraining order and preliminary injunction that would halt the FCC proceeding in which Carr is threatening to deny renewals of broadcast licenses held by ABC stations.
The lawsuit accused the FCC of violating the First Amendment by retaliating against the company’s protected expression. In particular, it asked the court to prevent the FCC from issuing a Hearing Designation Order that would all but guarantee a negative outcome for the ABC stations. While ABC station licenses are scheduled for renewals between 2028 and 2031, Carr took the highly unusual step of ordering the stations to file renewal applications several years early.
Revoking a license in the middle of a term has been described as somewhere between difficult and effectively impossible. Despite the legal difficulty of revoking a license, Disney’s lawsuit said the FCC could use a hearing “to deny license renewal or immediately revoke the Stations’ licenses, forcing Plaintiffs off the air entirely, as the President has repeatedly demanded.” Even if the FCC doesn’t go that far, it can “mir[e] ABC in years of costly litigation, with the threat of adverse action ever present and with every editorial judgment shadowed by the prospect of provoking the Administration into further retaliation,” the lawsuit said.
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