Even Disney Is Fed Up with the FCC’s Dirty Tricks
Brendan Carr’s shady moves against The View should be a major scandal
Disney loves a reluctant hero.
You know the trope: Circumstances force a cautious, cowardly or cynical character to go on a quest, join a rebellion or finally stand up for what’s right.
Under the Trump regime, corporate media have been woefully short of heroics — and the House of Mouse is no exception.
When Trump filed a spurious lawsuit against ABC News, the Disney bosses paid off the president. When FCC Chairman Brendan Carr came after ABC’s Jimmy Kimmel last fall, Disney took the “easy way” out and yanked the host off the air, reversing itself only after public outrage and an upsurge in Disney+ cancellations got its attention.
Like every cartoon bully, Trump and Carr just kept demanding more of Disney’s lunch money — reinstating bogus complaints about old presidential debates, attacking the company’s DEI programs and threatening to revoke Disney’s broadcast licenses after another made-up Kimmel “scandal” over a joke he made about the First Lady.
But a filing at the FCC last week, as The New York Times reported, suggests Disney is finally fighting back against this unconstitutional government censorship — in this case, the targeting of an ABC affiliate station in Texas.
Calling the FCC’s actions “unprecedented, beyond the Commission’s authority, and counterproductive to the Commission’s state goal of encouraging free speech and open political discussion,” Disney’s lawyers — including a former U.S. solicitor general — warn that the FCC’s actions “threaten to upend decades of settled law and practice and chill critical protected speech.”
Disney’s sudden spine-growing shows just how corrupt the FCC has gotten — and why Carr, Trump’s censorship czar, should be removed from office.
A bit of backstory
Any Disney tale includes a good origin story, and this one is no exception.
In 2002, the FCC told ABC that The View qualified as a “bona fide news interview program’ — meaning it could interview political figures of national interest without invoking so-called equal-time rules that would require it to make space for other candidates. This ruling was not unusual or controversial.
In fact, since 1984, the FCC has exempted daytime talk shows like The View, and late-night equivalents like Kimmel’s and Stephen Colbert’s programs, from the equal-time rules. Under that exception, stations do not need to tell the FCC about a candidate’s appearance by filing official notice in the station’s “political file,” which discloses political ads and the like.
But under Trump, there’s only one rule that matters: Make the boss happy.
So Carr, his censor-in-chief, has weaponized the agency’s procedures against any show the channel-surfing president denounces. In this case, Carr launched a bogus investigation into The View after its hosts interviewed Democratic Texas Senate candidate James Talarico on Feb. 2.
This is where things start to get extremely shady.
Enforcement or entrapment?
According to the timeline laid out in Disney’s filing, the FCC’s Media Bureau sent a missive on Feb. 11 to the ABC-owned affiliate station in Houston, KTRK-TV, asking whether it had put a record of Talarico's appearance on The View into its political file. KTRK responded that it hadn’t because the program was exempt and had been for 20-plus years.
The FCC wrote back in March and ordered ABC to file a new “petition for declaratory ruling” on whether it still qualified for the longstanding equal-time exemption. According to Disney, the agency said that the other 19 ABC affiliates airing in Texas had “all filed a notice” of Talarico’s appearance. The FCC claimed “the bona fide news interview exception is not a position uniformly held by broadcasters that air the program.”
But here’s the corrupt bombshell buried in Disney documents (emphasis added):
“The Bureau neglected to note, however, that while certain ABC affiliates documented Talarico’s appearance in their online public inspection files, the filings were made more than two weeks after Talarico’s appearance and apparently at the request of the FCC, which reportedly promised to eschew enforcement for the late filing. KTRK Television received no such request and no such offer, despite the Bureau specifically contacting it about the Talarico appearance less than 10 days after it occurred.”
In other words, none of the stations filed when the show aired because they were all exempt. They only filed after the FCC contacted the affiliate stations — except for the one ABC owned — and promised not to penalize them if they changed their records. Then the FCC used these files to claim the ABC station in Houston was out of line with the other broadcasters it had coerced.
There’s only one conclusion: This was a setup.
Carr’s all-too-willing accomplices?
Among the 19 other ABC affiliates serving Texas are four stations Sinclair owns, four Tegna owns, three Gray Media owns, two Nexstar owns and two Scripps owns. These are all companies that have or had deals pending before the FCC, meaning it’s no surprise they jumped in so fast.
Nexstar and Sinclair, of course, were the same broadcasters that refused to air Kimmel’s show last fall when Carr started rattling his sabers. They’ve been all too willing to collude with Carr to harass the president’s perceived enemies, free speech be damned.
“This doesn’t just violate the First Amendment rights of broadcasters on the receiving end of Brendan Carr’s tactics,” my colleague Jessica J. González said last week of the FCC’s censorial shenanigans, “it also harms the broadcasters’ audiences. People deserve access to diverse viewpoints over the airwaves.”
When the mouse roars
Disney isn’t really a hero, reluctant or otherwise. It’s as laser focused as ever on its bottom line. But the company’s better-late-than-never opposition to Carr’s abuse and overreach suggests that this era of abject media surrender may be coming to an end.
“I am encouraged to see that Disney is choosing courage over capitulation,” the FCC’s Anna Gomez, the one Democrat left at the FCC, wrote in a letter to Disney CEO Josh D’Amaro on Monday. “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.”
We can only hope Disney’s overdue display of courage — looking at you here, Congress — is contagious.
Allied forces
World Press Freedom every day. Amnesty International and Free Press are hosting a webinar tonight, May 12, at 8 p.m. ET/5 p.m. PT on threats facing journalists and media workers globally. At a time when journalists and media workers face increasing danger — from criminalization and harassment to digital surveillance and political intimidation — this discussion couldn’t be more timely. Register here to join the conversation.
Demand digital equity. The National Digital Inclusion Alliance has launched a month of actions to fight for digital equity, a year after the Trump administration announced its intention to kill the Digital Equity Act. While its lawsuit against the administration’s cuts to committed funding for digital inclusion moves forward, NDIA is also calling on Congress to step in and restore this funding.
As Public Knowledge’s Alisa Valentin explains in a post supporting the effort, the gutting of this crucial program is just one way in which the Trump administration is “recklessly abandoning programs that acknowledge and seek to remedy the historic and present harms inflicted upon communities that have been intentionally or disparately pushed to the margins.”
“In addition to harming people of color,” she writes, “the president’s scapegoating of people of color has the added harm of depriving millions of white Americans of the digital inclusion support they need, simply out of spite that people of color may benefit.”
Alisa Valentin
The kicker
“What Disney and ABC are facing is not a series of coincidental regulatory actions but a 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. You are not the first target of this campaign, and you will not be the last.” —Letter from FCC Commissioner Anna Gomez to Disney CEO Josh D’Amaro
About the author
Craig Aaron is the co-CEO of Free Press and Free Press Action and a guy with two first names. Follow him on Bluesky.
