The FCC and its current chairman, Brendan Carr, were blasted by former heads of the agency and other officials as pursuing a campaign to “censor Disney‘s and ABC‘s speech” with its highly unusual early review of spectrum licenses for eight ABC-owned TV stations.
In a filing Tuesday with the FCC, the officials — who served under Republican and Democratic presidents — urged the current agency leadership to terminate the proceeding. In April, the FCC’s Media Bureau issued an unprecedented order forcing ABC to reapply for spectrum licenses for its owned-and-operated stations on an accelerated schedule. The move came one day after President Donald Trump called for Jimmy Kimmel to be fired over a joke the late-night host made about First Lady Melania Trump (Kimmel said Melania had “a glow like an expectant widow”).
“This early license renewal proceeding is unprecedented in the history of the Federal Communications Commission and a grave violation of both the Communications Act and the Constitution,” the coalition of officials wrote in the filing. “Through this proceeding, the FCC seeks to censor Disney’s and ABC’s speech and send a chilling message to all broadcasters: carry speech we don’t like at your peril.”
They continued: “This renewal proceeding is the latest attack in a sustained campaign by Chairman Carr and the Trump administration of threatening legal sanctions against licensees whose speech President Trump dislikes. And although the purported justification for the early renewal proceeding is that it is in aid of a Commission investigation into unlawful employment discrimination, it is in fact an assault on free speech disguised as regulatory process.”
“As former Chairs, Commissioners, Chiefs of Staff, General Counsels and Bureau Chiefs, we call on the Commission to respect the constitutional and congressional prohibitions on its ‘power of censorship’ and terminate this proceeding,” they wrote.
The officials who signed the filing included Mark Fowler, FCC chairman under President Ronald Reagan; Tom Wheeler, chairman under President Barack Obama; Alfred Sikes, chairman under President George W. Bush; and several high-ranking lawyers and advisers to past agency commissioners.
Reps for the FCC did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
The FCC and Carr have asserted the early ABC license review is pursuant to the agency’s investigation into Disney and ABC’s potential violations of discrimination rules via the media conglomerate’s diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) practices.
But the ex-FCC officials wrote in their filing that the “proceeding is pretext for the Chairman’s continued campaign of suppressing disfavored speech.” They said public reporting and the notice establishing the procedures for the proceeding suggest that Carr “has prejudged the outcome of this proceeding and that the Commission may assert the power to terminate the stations’ licenses early.”
In May, Disney submitted license-renewal applications for the eight ABC stations, which the company said it did “under protest in response to an unlawful, arbitrary, and unconstitutional order.” Last month, Disney launched a campaign across its stations urging viewers to share comments about the FCC’s proceeding with the agency.
To date, the FCC proceeding seeking comment on ABC’s early license renewal has drawn more than 141,000 comments. The deadline for submitting comments is Aug. 5.
In their filing, the former FCC officials said that two conservative groups that filed comments in the proceeding calling for the agency to deny ABC’s license renewals — the Center for American Rights and the Media Research Center — made requests that “are not legitimate subjects of FCC regulation.” The two groups “ask the Commission to interfere with the stations’ First Amendment-protected editorial discretion: word choices, fact-checks, time covering certain topics, personnel, and the licensees’ perceived viewpoints,” the officials said.
The CAR and MRC petitions ask the FCC to take actions that are “a stunning — and plainly unconstitutional — expansion of the Commission’s role,” the officials said in the filing.
Meanwhile, Carr last week said the agency will consider ABC’s decision to not carry a live broadcast of Trump’s July 16 speech about U.S. election security as part of its early review of the ABC station licenses. At a press conference, Carr said, “I’m sure that there are going to be points raised in that proceeding” about Disney/ABC’s decision to not air Trump’s speech. “I think that when you have the president of the United States standing inside the White House delivering an important speech, I think that’s something that broadcasters should be carrying,” Carr said.
Also at the FCC press conference, Anna Gomez, the agency’s only Democratic commissioner, pushed back on Carr’s assertion that broadcasters are compelled to carry a president’s speech. “I continue to say that this vague public interest standard is being used just to punish speech that this administration doesn’t like and to reward speech that it does like,” Gomez said. “That’s inappropriate, and it’s contrary to the law and to the Constitution.”
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