ABC SUES FCC AS TRUMP SEEKS TOTAL CONTROL OF BROADCAST NETWORKS
The commission called ABC's eight stations in for renewal years early, then repealed the rule that kept its rivals from ever owning them. Twelve days later, Disney sued.
Disney and ABC sued the Federal Communications Commission and its chairman Brendan Carr in federal court in Washington this morning, asking a judge to stop the agency before it can act against eight television licenses. Their lawyers emailed notice to the Justice Department at 8:17. The motion is marked "EMERGENCY HEARING RESPECTFULLY REQUESTED." By late morning no judge had set one.
The complaint's spine is twenty-four hours long. On April 27 Trump called a Jimmy Kimmel joke "a despicable call to violence" and demanded Disney fire him. On April 28 the commission's video division ordered every ABC-owned station to file for license renewal — WABC in New York five years early, WPVI in Philadelphia five years and two months early, and six more in Los Angeles, Chicago, San Francisco, Houston, Fresno and Durham. Thirty days to file. Disney asked for sixty more and was refused without explanation. The order cited an investigation into "unlawful discrimination" and a need to confirm ABC had been meeting "its public interest obligations more broadly." It never mentioned Kimmel. Carr has said the agency had not reached for this tool in fifty or sixty years.
Federal law bars the commission from granting a renewal more than thirty days before a license expires, and every one of these eight has years left to run. A renewal cannot lawfully be granted now. The only outcomes available to the agency are the bad ones, which is the complaint's argument in a sentence: "Any FCC adjudication would be a charade."
