ABC Urges FCC to Drop "Unprecedented" License Renewal Proceedings Against Its Stations

ABC has formally urged the Federal Communications Commission to abandon what the network is calling an "extraordinary and unprecedented" proceeding targeting its broadcast station licenses, escalating a months-long standoff with the Brendan Carr-led agency over renewal reviews that ABC says were launched in retaliation for its news coverage.

The Disney-owned network laid out its position in a new filing submitted Thursday, in which it also revealed it has added veteran litigator Beth Wilkinson to its legal team. Wilkinson has recently taken on high-profile media work, having also signed on this year to represent Paramount in an antitrust suit brought against it by a coalition of state attorneys general.

The filing marks the latest chapter in a dispute that began earlier this year when the FCC called in all eight of ABC's broadcast licenses for early renewal, a move the network complied with only "under protest."

While the agency's stated justification centered on parent company Disney's diversity, equity and inclusion policies, ABC has pointed out that the license review came shortly after the administration publicly pressured the network to take action against late-night host Jimmy Kimmel over a joke he made on air, suggesting the timing was not coincidental.

Separately, the FCC opened another proceeding scrutinizing The View, arguing the daytime talk show does not qualify as a legitimate news program and therefore should not be shielded from the agency's equal opportunity rules for political candidates.

ABC pushed back against that effort in a filing earlier this month, and in Thursday's submission it warned that the FCC now seems prepared to rule that The View must offer equal airtime to any qualified political candidate simply for interviewing one, a standard the network says would upend decades of established agency precedent.

In response to the FCC's actions, ABC launched a public on-air campaign asking viewers to voice support for both its station licenses and The View. According to Thursday's filing, that campaign generated more than 150,000 public comments to the agency, the overwhelming majority of which backed ABC's position, including submissions from Republican voices, free-market advocacy groups and a bipartisan collection of former FCC commissioners and officials.

Notably, ABC disclosed that it relied on artificial intelligence tools from Anthropic and OpenAI to help sort through and evaluate the massive volume of comments, though it said human reviewers independently checked a random sample of the AI's assessments to confirm their accuracy.

The network states that the agency has, for the first time in its history, ordered an entire group of commonly owned local stations tied to a single broadcast network to undergo simultaneous early license renewal reviews, well ahead of when those licenses would normally expire.

ABC argues there is little mystery as to why these particular eight stations were singled out, noting that all are owned by the network and that the administration has repeatedly and openly called for ABC's licenses to be revoked specifically because officials object to the content and viewpoints aired on its programming.

Beyond addressing the specific complaints raised by the FCC and by outside interest groups that have weighed in on the proceedings, ABC's filing argues more broadly that the entire effort should be thrown out because it represents government retaliation dressed up as routine regulatory oversight. The network contends the case against it is intended to serve as a warning to the broader media industry, not just to ABC itself.

The filing states that the pressure campaign against ABC is meant to signal to every media company in the country that they must fall in line with the administration's preferences for news coverage or face consequences. It further argues that similar regulatory and financial pressure tactics have been deployed elsewhere across government against other outlets and voices the administration views unfavorably, with the specific methods varying but the underlying goal remaining consistent: to cultivate a media landscape too intimidated by potential government retaliation to report freely and independently.