WASHINGTON—FCC commissioner Anna Gomez has issued a sharply worded statement criticizing the agency’s Media Bureau for dismissing a petition for special relief seeking a repeal of its “news distortion” policies.
The November 2025 petition, filed by a bipartisan group of former FCC officials, asked the agency to rescind the news distortion policy, which has “significantly chilled and otherwise altered the content of broadcasters’ speech, undermining First Amendment values.”
On June 22, Acting Media Bureau Chief Alexander Sanjenis dismissed the petition on procedural grounds without attempting to defend the FCC’s authority to investigate broadcasters for violations of “news distortion” policies or the First Amendment issues raised by its recent interest in enforcing those policies.
“Petitioners have failed to present their request in a manner that is cognizable under our rules,” Sanjenis wrote in a two-page June 22 letter. “ACCORDINGLY, it is ordered that the Petition for Special Relief IS DISMISSED WITHOUT PREJUDICE.”
In a July 1 statement, Gomez criticized the Media Bureau for abusing its authority to decide such matters without a full commission vote.
“The Commission regularly uses delegated authority to get the work of the Commission done, issuing licenses, seeking comment, granting rule waivers, etc.,” she noted. “Delegated authority allows the Commission to operate efficiently.
“Delegated authority, however, can be abused to shield significant actions from judicial review as only final Commission actions can be appealed,” she said. “That is what appears to be happening in this instance and the consequences for our democracy are serious. The Commission has repeatedly used the Media Bureau to take actions that are inconsistent with longstanding Commission precedent that violate both the Communications Act and the First Amendment.”
Gomez, the FCC’s sole Democrat, also insisted that these abuses were part of a larger pattern to crack down on news coverage that is critical of the government.
“The Commission has increasingly used its regulatory authority as a cudgel against broadcasters whose coverage it dislikes rather than as a neutral enforcement tool, and license renewals and merger approvals have been treated as leverage over editorial judgment rather than as the objective processes the Communications Act requires them to be,” she said.
“This is not an isolated tactic, and the Commission has repeatedly reached for rarely used or long dormant authority to discipline broadcasters it views as critical, including reviving a license renewal mechanism that had not been invoked in over half a century apparently to target a single company's news coverage,” she added.
“This includes repeated reliance on the previously rarely invoked news distortion policy at issue here," Gomez continued. "That pressure has had a real effect, and station groups and local broadcasters across the country have asked my office what topics are now considered too risky to cover, a question that should never need to be asked in a country with a First Amendment.
“When a federal agency with the power to grant or revoke broadcast licenses starts weighing in on editorial content, the chilling effect reaches far beyond any single station or story, and it is compounded here by the Commission's choice to resolve this particular petition through an unpublished staff letter rather than a public vote of the full Commission,” she concluded.
