Disney is going to court to defend its ABC television stations from the Trump administration’s pressure campaign.
On Tuesday, the media company filed a lawsuit in federal court alleging that Trump’s FCC is violating its First Amendment rights.
The administration “has waged a retaliatory campaign against ABC for a single reason: it disapproves of what ABC broadcasts,” the lawsuit filed in DC District Court alleges.
The legal action comes as the FCC investigates the ABC talk show “The View” and mounts an unusual challenge to the licenses held by ABC stations.
The stations fall under the FCC’s purview because they broadcast over the public airwaves.
FCC chairman Brendan Carr, a Trump loyalist, has scrutinized Disney on several fronts, including DEI, short for diversity, equity, and inclusion. Carr has said that Disney might be committing “illegal DEI discrimination.”
Carr’s critics have said DEI is a laughable pretext for what’s really happening: A political pressure campaign led by President Trump.
The president has railed against ABC (and other networks) for years. He has repeatedly denounced the network’s reporters and argued for licenses to be revoked.
Last April, when conservatives expressed outrage over a controversial joke made by ABC late-night comic Jimmy Kimmel, Trump pressured ABC to fire Kimmel.
As ABC stood by Kimmel’s show, Carr ordered the network to file early-renewal paperwork for its station licenses, even though the eight licenses weren’t due for renewal for several years.
Carr asserted that the timing was a coincidence and the license review was related to his DEI probe. But it was widely viewed as a form of government retaliation for airing Kimmel’s show and resisting Trump’s pressure.
There are more than 200 ABC-affiliated stations across the US, but most are owned by other companies. Eight are owned by Disney directly, and those are the stations targeted by the FCC.
FCC licenses are renewed every eight years and are virtually never revoked. Until this year, the FCC had not filed an early-renewal order in decades.
But Carr has been determined to wield the FCC’s limited power in new and politically charged ways.
Tuesday’s lawsuit specifically asks the court to stop Carr from moving forward with the license challenge. “This Court’s intervention is necessary to stop the Federal Communications Commission’s extraordinary assault on free speech,” the suit states.
Carr did not immediately respond to CNN’s request for comment.
Carr also opened a case against “The View” over an alleged violation of “equal-time,” invoking a rule that has rarely been enforced in recent years. “The View” features outspoken critics of Trump.
A wide range of First Amendment groups have denounced the action against ABC, while some conservative groups have defended Carr, arguing that the Trump administration is well within its rights. “It is not in the public interest for ABC to operate as an arm of the DNC,” Carr ally Daniel Suhr, president of the Center for American Rights, said earlier this year.
Last week, Disney CEO Josh D’Amaro said in a CNBC interview that “our position on this is clear.”
When asked about the FCC threat, D’Amaro cited ABC’s “journalistic integrity” and said, “We’re not going to be told how to run that side of our business.”
D’Amaro added, “I like what we do. We tell incredible stories. I think we do it well. We do it around the world. And we’re going to stay committed to that.”
Tuesday’s lawsuit states that the pressure against ABC “has been deeply felt throughout the company.”
“The campaign is also calculated to operate in terrorem upon the rest of the industry: ABC is the visible target and suffers the most immediate harm, but the message is addressed to every broadcaster in the country, and the ultimate cost is borne by the press as a whole,” the suit alleges.
