WASHINGTON—The Walt Disney Co.’s ABC-owned stations called a Federal Communications Commission order that they file early license renewals “unlawful, arbitrary, and unconstitutional.”
In a letter attached to one of the license renewals, submitted on May 28, ABC-owned WABC-TV New York noted that 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 is inconsistent with a legitimate exercise of investigative authority and is plainly incompatible with the First Amendment,” the letter said. “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. WABC files this application without waiving any rights, and calls on the Commission to rescind the Order.”
As previously reported, the FCC issued an order in late April requiring Disney’s ABC-owned stations must file for an early license renewal by May 28. The order referred to FCC’s ongoing investigation of diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) policies at Disney but it follows months of comments by President Donald Trump and FCC Chair Brendan Carr suggesting that the stations should lose their licenses over comments made by network late-night host Jimmy Kimmel.
In its May 28 letter to the FCC, Disney's WABC alleged that the Commission's investigation into DEI was simply a pretext "to punish the Station for speech the government does not like."
The May 28 filings by Disney’s ABC-owned stations came on the same day that the FCC issued a public notice asserting wide-ranging powers to regulate broadcast content under the rubric of “public interest” standards. Those public interest standards include the requirement that "broadcasters are also prohibited from engaging in news distortion," the agency insisted.
In response to the FCC’s claim that legal precedent allows it to regulate news content, the Commission’s lone Democrat, Commissioner Anna Gomez, asserted: “The ‘public interest’ does not mean this administration's interests. Broadcasters should ignore these latest threats and stiffen their spine.“
Gomez also blasted the FCC’s order requiring Disney to file for early renewal of its broadcast licenses. “Disney and its ABC stations are the latest victims of this administration's campaign of censorship and control,” she said. “I am glad to see them expose the FCC's actions as nothing more than naked political retribution and an unlawful assault on free speech and a free press.”
Disney also faces a separate FCC investigation into possible violations of equal time rules for political candidates by "The View". In response to that investigation, ABC filed a sternly worded petition earlier this month arguing that the “Commission’s actions threaten to upend decades of settled law and practice and chill critical protected speech, both with respect to ‘The View’ and more broadly.”
WABC-TV’s May 28 letter filed a number of similar arguments regarding free speech and censorship. More specifically, the station questioned the validity of the FCC's DEI investigation into Disney, which prompted the order demanding early license renewal applications.
Before tne order was issued, the letter noted, the Enforcement Bureau had already served a string of inquiries and Disney had produced more than 11,000 pages of documents on a mutually agreed schedule without hearing any complaints from the FCC on its compliance.
“It is not credible to now declare the early renewal process `essential' to the same investigation, particularly when after releasing the Order, the Enforcement Bureau issued yet another request for information to which the Company is required to respond less than 24 hours after the instant filing,” the letter said. “The early renewal procedure is not an investigative tool and adds nothing to the Commission’s investigative capacity.”
The letter also strongly pushes back against possible discriminatory behavior at the ABC stations.
“The Order purports to investigate `possible violations' of the `prohibition on unlawful discrimination,' but never identifies what violation it had in mind,” the letter said. “The Commission has never articulated—let alone adopted through notice-and-comment rulemaking—any new compliance standard under its broadcast Equal Employment Opportunity (“EEO”) requirements, which focus on non-discrimination and providing access to opportunities for those from underrepresented groups. It has never stated whether or when diversity, equity and inclusion (“DEI”) practices violate a Commission rule or warrant ordinary punishment, much less the extraordinary punishment of a demand for early license renewal A licensee cannot comply with a standard that is announced nowhere, defined nowhere, and exists nowhere.”
“In truth, the Station has acted consistently with the Commission’s EEO requirements,” the station said. “Yet it is now being punished under an interpretation the Commission invented but has never promulgated or even fully articulated—one that turns the longstanding EEO rules on their head. A licensee cannot be held to a standard it was never given notice of—that is not enforcement, it is arbitrary, capricious, and a denial of due process. And even if the Commission were to eventually declare that the Station committed an EEO rule violation—a finding that the Station in no way concedes—jeopardizing the Station’s license would be grossly disproportionate to any such violation, especially one premised on an unarticulated standard.
“The only plausible reason to issue the Order is to punish the Station for speech the government does not like,” the letter concluded. “Commissioner Gomez recognized in her May 11, 2026 letter what the record makes plain: The Commission’s actions against Disney and ABC constitute ‘not a series of coincidental regulatory actions but a sustained, coordinated campaign of censorship and control, carried out through the weaponization of the FCC’s authority as a federal regulator and aimed at pressuring a free and independent press and all media into submission.’ This is not a partisan point. Senator Ted Cruz [R-Texas] called one of Chairman Carr’s threats to broadcasters ‘dangerous as hell’ and warned that “[g]overnment officials threatening adverse consequences for disfavored content is an unconstitutional coercion that chills protected speech.’”
The filings can be found here, with WABC-TV’s letter to the FCC objecting to the early renewal at the bottom of the page.
