FCC Chair to Raise ABC's Trump Speech Skip in License Review
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- Brendan Carr told reporters the FCC will consider ABC's refusal to carry Trump's July 16 White House speech on election security live as part of an open proceeding evaluating whether the network's eight owned-and-operated stations have been "operating in the public interest."
- Trump used the speech to allege U.S. elections were "rigged and stolen" and to claim China illegally accessed millions of voter files to manipulate the 2018 and 2020 elections, then called out ABC and NBC for not airing it and said broadcasters who do this should "lose their licenses."
- Carr said that when the president delivers an important speech from the White House, "that's something broadcasters should be carrying," and pledged the FCC will "hold all broadcasters" to that same public-interest standard.
- Disney submitted license-renewal applications for the eight ABC stations "under protest," calling the FCC's April order forcing accelerated reapplication for spectrum licenses "unlawful, arbitrary, and unconstitutional," and last month launched a viewer campaign urging comments to the FCC.
- The FCC's April license-review order came just days after Trump publicly called for Jimmy Kimmel to be fired over a joke about First Lady Melania Trump and stems from the agency's investigation into Disney/ABC's potential DEI discrimination violations.
- Carr also announced at the same press conference a planned FCC vote to eliminate the 39% national TV station ownership cap, framing it as letting local stations "compete on a more level playing field" with national programmers.
Why it matters: Disney has already formally labeled the FCC's underlying license-review order "unlawful, arbitrary, and unconstitutional" while complying under protest, putting a major broadcaster on a collision course with an FCC chair who just said he intends to use those same reviews to enforce presidential airtime — a conflict that elevates an editorial-coverage dispute into a First Amendment legal fight over whether the government can condition broadcast licenses on carrying the president's remarks.
