FCC orders early license review of Disney's ABC stations a day after Trump demands Kimmel's firing

On April 28, 2026, the Federal Communications Commission ordered The Walt Disney Company to file early license-renewal applications, within 30 days, for the eight ABC-owned broadcast stations it operates in cities including New York and Chicago. The order does not touch the 200-plus independently owned ABC affiliates, and the eight licenses at issue were not otherwise due for renewal for years. The FCC said it had been investigating the stations "for possible violations of the Communications Act of 1934 and the FCC's rules, including the agency's prohibition on unlawful discrimination," tying the move to Chairman Brendan Carr's characterization of Disney's diversity, equity and inclusion programs as discriminatory.

The order landed one day after President Trump, on Truth Social, blamed Kimmel for an incident outside the White House Correspondents' Association dinner and said he "should be immediately fired" — escalating a pressure campaign over a Kimmel joke about First Lady Melania Trump. An early-renewal call of this kind had not been issued in decades; legal observers noted that the standard for denying a renewal is "almost insurmountable" and that any hearing and review would take years, during which the stations operate normally. That gap between the procedural step and any plausible penalty is why critics described the order as a use of process itself as punishment.

Anna Gomez, the FCC's lone Democratic commissioner, said the action was "unprecedented, unlawful, and going nowhere," urging companies to "challenge it head-on" because "the First Amendment is on their side." Press-freedom advocates echoed the point: the Freedom of the Press Foundation called it "illegal jawboning intended to intimidate ABC," arguing the FCC "is neither the journalism police nor the humor police." Using the commission's licensing authority against a broadcaster the day after the President demanded a host's firing fits a documented pattern of wielding regulatory levers to retaliate against disfavored speech.

Updates

2026-06-25 — FCC Chair Carr accused ABC of running a "misinformation campaign" [6, 7, 8]

FCC Chairman Brendan Carr accused Disney's ABC of a "campaign of misinformation" after the network ran ad spots urging viewers to oppose the FCC's reviews of "The View" and the early license renewal of its eight owned stations. Speaking at the FCC's monthly press conference, Carr disputed ABC's characterization that the agency was trying to control who appears on the show, saying the equal-time law simply requires comparable time for non-bona-fide-news programs. The proceedings had drawn over 52,000 public comments on the "View" petition and over 39,000 on the license review. In a separate Reuters interview the same week, Carr said "all options remain on the table" in the license review.

2026-07-30 — ABC accused FCC of an 18-month "attempted censorship" campaign in new regulatory filing [9, 10]

ABC filed a roughly 109-page response in the FCC's license-renewal proceeding accusing Chairman Brendan Carr and the agency of an 18-month campaign to find a pretext for revoking its stations' licenses, calling the effort "attempted censorship" aimed at pressuring the broader media industry. "The retaliation against ABC is a signal to every media company in the country: accommodate the Administration's view of what news coverage should look like or pay the price," the network wrote, adding that "the FCC has spent the last 18 months searching for some pretext for revoking the Stations' licenses... The Commission has found none, because the Stations easily meet the standard for license renewal." The FCC responded that it was acting on "equal opportunity regulations" and accused ABC of operating in "the narrow or partisan interests of a political party."

2026-08-18 — Disney and ABC sued FCC over early license review, alleging First Amendment retaliation [11, 12, 13]

Disney and ABC filed a federal lawsuit in Washington, D.C. against the FCC seeking to block the early license-renewal proceeding, arguing in the complaint that "acting through the Federal Communications Commission, the Administration has waged a retaliatory campaign against ABC for a single reason: it disapproves of what ABC broadcasts." The filing came the same day a group of former FCC officials who served under both Republican and Democratic presidents sent the agency a letter urging it to terminate the proceeding, calling the review "an assault on free speech disguised as regulatory process."