ABC slams FCC Chairman Carr while asking for renewal of its broadcast licenses
That a major network filed paperwork with the Federal Communications Commission about its broadcast licenses might sound bureaucratic and uninteresting. But in this week’s instance, what matters isn’t just the filing itself, but also why it was filed, when it was filed and what the network had to say as part of its efforts. Politico reported:
Disney-owned ABC formally asked the Federal Communications Commission to renew licenses for its eight broadcast TV stations on Thursday, but not without chastising Chair Brendan Carr for infringing the Constitution.
The applications urge the commission to rescind Carr’s order calling in the licenses early, saying the move has “no legitimate purpose.”
The path leading to this point is long and circuitous. After Donald Trump targeted ABC late-night host Jimmy Kimmel, for example, the president’s FCC chairman appeared on a far-right podcast last September and discussed his agency’s role in granting broadcast licenses. Referring specifically to a Kimmel monologue that Republicans didn’t like, Carr added, “When we see stuff like this — look, we can do this the easy way or the hard way.”
Roughly seven months later, the public got a better sense of what “the hard way” looks like. In April the FCC launched a highly unusual early review of ABC’s broadcast station licenses. Although the commission claimed the review was related to the network’s efforts to hire a diverse workforce (which the Republican administration apparently finds offensive), the developments came immediately after the White House condemned a joke Kimmel told about the age difference between the president and the first lady.
In an online statement, Anna Gomez, the FCC’s lone Democratic commissioner, wrote, “This is unprecedented, unlawful, and going nowhere. This political stunt won’t stick.”
ABC nevertheless felt compelled to follow through on the review process, albeit grudgingly, alongside accusations that the FCC was engaged in a campaign of “unconstitutional retaliation and coercion.” The same filing made the inescapable observation that the timing of the FCC’s demand “makes the retaliatory purpose unmistakable.”
As The New York Times reported, ABC also noted “that the F.C.C. had not called for an early station renewal in more than 50 years and had never done so for an entire group of network-owned stations at once.”
It’s worth noting for context that Carr’s FCC also recently launched an investigation into “The View,” a popular ABC talk show, sparking related accusations about government censorship.
Time will tell what becomes of these efforts — Carr, a co-author of the far-right playbook Project 2025, appeared on CNBC on Friday morning, again making threats related to ABC’s broadcast license — but as the process advances, there are a handful of elements worth keeping in mind.
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Steve Benen is a producer for “The Rachel Maddow Show,” the editor of MaddowBlog and an MS NOW political contributor. He’s also the bestselling author of “Ministry of Truth: Democracy, Reality, and the Republicans’ War on the Recent Past.”
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