The FCC’s lone Democratic commissioner again expressed mounting concerns over the Trump administration and Chairman Brendan Carr’s apparent attacks on ABC, “The View” and late night host Jimmy Kimmel, writing in a new letter to Disney CEO Josh D’Amaro, “This is a fight worth having, and one that I am confident you will win.”
“I am encouraged to see that Disney is choosing courage over capitulation,” Commissioner Anna M. Gomez wrote, admitting, “The fight ahead may not be easy, but the law, the facts, and the public are on your side. This is a fight worth having, and one that I am confident you will win. I am committed to using every tool available to me as a Commissioner to shine a light on what this FCC is doing to curtail press freedom and to hold this process to account at every step.”
The letter came after Disney filed a Petition for Declaratory Ruling on Friday to the FCC, arguing that its probe into “The View” for allegedly violating the organization’s “equal time” rule after Texas’ Democratic Senatorial candidate James Talarico’s appearance threatens to “chill critical protected speech, both with respect to ‘The View’ and more broadly.”
Disney’s filing additionally noted that “The View” has been broadcasting under a news exemption that was granted to the program more than 20 years ago that is “consistent with longstanding Commission interpretations designed to minimize the serious First Amendment problems inherent in the equal time regime.” It also noted that there’s “never been a more robust” marketplace for American audiences to seek out political information from all sides, citing the surplus of podcast, cable, social media and streaming options available.
Echoing Disney, Gomez argued in her letter to D’Amaro Monday that the FCC’s “equal time” investigation upends “decades of settled agency precedent, rewriting the rules of the road specifically to create new exposure for broadcasters it wanted to target.”
“The pattern by now is familiar: a complaint is filed, an investigation is opened with maximum visibility, and the process itself becomes the pressure,” Gomez wrote. “This Commission has repeated that same pattern across multiple companies it regulates. These investigations are often announced with much fanfare, pursued selectively against perceived critics of this Administration, and most are destined never to be brought to any enforcement conclusion that could face judicial review. That is because the threat is the point.”
The move against “The View” came after the FCC’s Media Bureau ordered an early renewal review of ABC’s broadcast licenses last month — an unprecedented move in the aftermath of Kimmel’s ill-timed joke that First Lady Melania Trump is an “expectant widow” two days before the assassination attempt at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner. Carr has maintained that the review is not a result of Trump and his followers’ rage at the late night host’s joke but instead related to Disney’s DEI practices.
“Ultimately, this effort to punish and intimidate your company will not succeed,” Gomez assured of the bureau’s latest effort. “The FCC’s internal process will be lengthy, and should it produce an outcome unfavorable to your stations, Disney will have every right to challenge that outcome in federal court, a process that could take years. Throughout all of it, Disney’s stations keep their licenses.”
Elsewhere in her letter, the Democratic commissioner lambasted the “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.”
Read the letter in full below here.
