By David Shepardson
WASHINGTON, May 28 (Reuters) – Walt Disney unit ABC on Thursday filed applications for early license review with the Federal Communications Commission for its eight company owned television stations after President Donald Trump pressured the regulatory agency to take action.
The early reviews – the first for a major TV broadcaster in more than 50 years – were ordered in April a day after Trump urged ABC to fire late-night host Jimmy Kimmel. Disney said the FCC early license renewal order was “unlawful, arbitrary, and unconstitutional” and violates its First Amendment free speech rights.
“This effort to suppress speech under the guise of bureaucratic process must not prevail,” ABC added. “It is an unprecedented attack on a single company’s entire portfolio of broadcast licenses.”
The FCC said last month the reviews, which were not supposed to begin until October 2028, were prompted by a year-long probe on the FCC’s ban on unlawful discrimination. The stations are located in Fresno, Los Angeles, Chicago, San Francisco, New York, Philadelphia, Houston and Durham, North Carolina.
Trump has repeatedly urged broadcasters to drop comedy or news programs he dislikes or which have been critical of him, pressing regulators to revoke licenses of broadcasters he says are unfair to him.
Democratic FCC Commissioner Anna Gomez says the Trump administration is engaged in a targeted effort to censor Disney and its ABC network through a series of sweeping regulatory actions.
The FCC is also investigating ABC daytime talk show “The View” after declaring it is subject to federal equal time rules for political candidates.
FCC Chair Brendan Carr opened an investigation in March 2025 into Disney’s diversity practices and said Disney submitted documents in the probe that he felt were insufficient. He declined to say if a similar review of diversity practices at Comcast and NBC could lead to an early review there.
Carr defended the decision to call for the early reviews saying “if Disney engaged in illegal DEI discrimination, if it failed to operate broadcast stations in the public interest, it will be held accountable.”
ABC rejected the argument that its nondiscrimination policies violated commission rules.
The company added it believed the proceeding was an exercise to search for a legal pretext to achieve its desired goal. The goal is “to ramp up toward possible license revocation and cause the station and others to think twice before they say something the government might dislike,” ABC said.
In November, Trump demanded the FCC revoke ABC licenses after he criticized an ABC News correspondent for asking Saudi Arabia’s crown prince about the 2018 killing of a Washington Post columnist in a question he dubbed “insubordinate.”
(Reporting by David Shepardson; Editing by Stephen Coates)
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