ABC: FCC order “has no legitimate purpose”
ABC submitted individual filings for WABC-TV in New York; WPVI-TV in Philadelphia; WTVD in Durham, North Carolina; WLS-TV in Chicago; KGO-TV in San Francisco; KFSN-TV in Fresno, California; KTRK-TV in Houston; and KABC-TV in Los Angeles.
The station “submits this license renewal application under protest in response to an unlawful, arbitrary, and unconstitutional Order issued on April 28, 2026, by the Media Bureau,” ABC’s filings said. “The Commission had not demanded early renewal in over five decades. And it has never before demanded simultaneous license renewal applications from a group of stations commonly owned with a network as it has here. The Order has no legitimate purpose.”
ABC said it was filing the applications without waiving any rights and called on the FCC to rescind the order.
“There is no information that the application will reveal that the Commission could not obtain through other means,” ABC wrote. “The Order is inconsistent with a legitimate exercise of investigative authority and is plainly incompatible with the First Amendment. Worse, the Order opens the door to an assault on the Station’s license, while the Commission searches for a legal pretext to achieve its desired goal. This effort to suppress speech under the guise of bureaucratic process must not prevail.”
Carr calls Disney responses “disingenuous”
Carr wrote in an X post yesterday that the “FCC has been investigating Disney for over a year now after reports surfaced alleging that it had been discriminating against people based on race, gender, or other protected characteristics in violation of federal nondiscrimination laws,” and that “Disney only filed these applications to renew their ABC broadcast licenses after the FCC informed the company that their responses to the agency’s investigation had been disingenuous, deficient, and improper.”
ABC said in its filings that the company produced over 11,000 pages of documents in response to a series of FCC requests. ABC said the order to file early license renewals “purports to investigate ‘possible violations’ of the ‘prohibition on unlawful discrimination,’ but never identifies what violation it had in mind.”
