Disney, ABC battle Trump’s FCC in court over free speech protections : NPR

A federal court in Washington, D.C., is to play host to a legal battle Tuesday morning pitting the Walt Disney Co. against the nation’s chief broadcast regulator over just how far First Amendment protections can go during the presidency of Donald Trump.

President Trump has repeatedly called for Disney’s ABC TV to fire late night comedian Jimmy Kimmel, who has consistently mocked the president. Trump has also routinely denounced ABC’s The View, accusing it of being liberal and unfair.

Trump had earlier sued the network, before returning to office, over incorrect statements anchor George Stephanopoulos made about the verdicts in writer E. Jean Carroll’s two lawsuits against Trump. ABC paid $16 million in a December 2024 settlement, including legal fees, to resolve that a month before Trump went back to the White House. But new Disney CEO Josh D’Amaro has authorized a high-stakes fight against the administration in court.

Brendan Carr, whom Trump elevated to be the chair of the Federal Communications Commission, has echoed the president’s complaints. And under Carr, the FCC is moving to review Disney’s ownership of all eight of the stations it owns, as part of the ABC Network, years ahead of schedule. That followed months of social media posts from Trump urging that the FCC strip ABC of its station licenses.

“There’s not even a question as to what Carr is doing. What Carr is doing is unconstitutional,” says Mark Fowler, a Republican former FCC chair under President Ronald Reagan. Fowler has filed a statement to aid ABC’s lawsuit in which he likened Carr’s actions to censorship. “The First Amendment is very plain in its wording and its meaning,” he says.

Technically, networks do not require licenses from the federal government to operate. Stations do need them to utilize publicly owned airwaves. They are perennially reviewed on a staggered basis and are typically renewed without much fanfare.

Carr has cited the requirement of stations to serve the “public interest,” initiated investigations of Disney’s diversity, equity and inclusion policies, and, though he says the license review is not linked to ABC’s content, he has blasted the network as biased.

Disney and ABC are seeking to get U.S. District Judge Loren L. AliKhan to issue an order preventing the FCC from accelerating the typical review process. She had compelled the FCC to hold off from moving ahead until this hearing. Media advocates, FCC veterans and legal observers say the move to challenge all ABC’s local licenses at once is unprecedented. And were it to be successful, it would hurt ABC badly in the bottom line. Six of those eight stations are in major media markets and contribute significantly to the network’s bottom line.

“The overreaching by the FCC is one of the greatest threats right now that’s facing journalism,” says Bruce Brown, the president of the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press.

In an interview with NPR in August, Carr said that the agency has not decided whether to pull the station licenses from ABC. Instead, he said, ABC is complaining about his drive to take the “public interest” component of the law seriously. And he said that the network is getting ahead of itself. The agency has not yet taken any action against ABC’s licenses — merely sped up their review.

That question may consume part of the legal wrangling on Tuesday as it will help determine whether ABC and Disney have standing to sue.

Conservative groups, including the fundraising outfits for U.S. Senate and House Republican candidates, filed briefs to support the FCC, and by extension, the president’s complaints about bias.

“By any commonsense standard, evidence of broadcaster intent to advance the candidacies of Democratic Party figures on The View is not merely present, but overwhelming,” the Republican fundraising committees say in a court filing.

Even so, several groups often affiliated with conservatives have weighed in against the Justice Department’s case, including the Cato Institute, the Competitive Enterprise Institute and the Institute for Policy Innovation.

They note that Carr has roundly condemned ABC over its content, and in seeming direct echoes of Trump’s condemnations — at one point saying on a right-wing podcast in September 2025 that ABC getting rid of Kimmel “can do this the easy way or the hard way.” ABC suspended Kimmel hours later over remarks he made about the killing of conservative activist Charlie Kirk.

The suspension was soon lifted after a public outcry.

Fellow satirists Seth Meyers of NBC’s Late Night and John Oliver of HBO’s Last Week Tonight paid tribute to their ABC counterpart during an episode of Jimmy Kimmel Live taped last week in Brooklyn.

“You come up all the time. [Fans] will normally say, how does it feel, being disliked by the current president? And we always say, as long as you’re on the air, we’re fine,” Oliver told Kimmel. “We are fully behind you — the way we’re fully behind a bulletproof vest.”

The Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press has filed a friend of the court brief on ABC’s behalf, hiring a former U.S. solicitor general who has argued repeatedly before the U.S. Supreme Court, to represent the organization at the district court level.

Bruce Brown, president of the group, pointed at a series of other actions by Carr and other Trump appointees: The FCC has launched investigations into all broadcast networks, including NPR (save Fox, which is controlled by the president’s allies, Rupert and Lachlan Murdoch); The administration has cut off access for many journalists at the White House and the Pentagon, while federal agents sought access to journalists’ devices to identify anonymous sources; all the while, the president has sought to delegitimize media outlets whose presentation of the news has sparked public displays of anger.

“This is only one part of a wide effort by the Trump administration to intimidate the press — and to try to coerce out of news organizations the type of coverage the president wants to see,” Brown says.