Broadcast networks do not sue the FCC. The agency renews your licenses, clears your mergers, and decides what counts as serving the public interest, all on a schedule it controls, so the sensible play is always to cooperate, produce what they ask for, and wait out whoever happens to be running the place. On Tuesday, Disney and ABC gave up on that and went into federal district court in Washington asking a judge to make it stop.
Beth Wilkinson signed the complaint. So did Paul Clement, who was George W. Bush’s Solicitor General and has spent twenty years arguing the conservative side of nearly everything that reaches the Supreme Court. He put his name on a First Amendment retaliation claim against Donald Trump’s FCC.
April
On April 23, Jimmy Kimmel’s show ran a skit about the upcoming White House Correspondents’ Dinner. On April 25, there was a shooting at the dinner. On April 27, the President pointed back at the joke, called it a despicable call to violence, and demanded that Disney and ABC fire Kimmel. The next morning the Commission ordered all eight ABC-owned stations to file license renewal applications within thirty days, which is a fraction of the time these applications normally take to assemble, and the Media Bureau turned down a request for a sixty-day extension without saying why.
None of those licenses were near expiring, and the complaint puts the whole thing in a table on page four. Durham runs through the end of 2028, Chicago through 2029, Houston and the three California stations into 2030, New York to June 2031, and Philadelphia to August 2031, which is more than five years ahead of schedule.
Carr has been candid about how far outside the ordinary this is. He told the Financial Times it had probably been fifty or sixty years or longer since the Commission used the tool, and added a line aimed at ABC that reads more like a warning than a regulatory position: if you didn’t take us seriously, now you should.
Why the proceeding only goes one direction
Section 309(k) tells the Commission to look backward at what a station did during the preceding license term. Section 307(d) forbids it from granting a renewal more than thirty days before the license expires, which makes sense on its own terms, because you cannot certify eight years of public service in year three of the term. The statute says nothing at all about denial, and that silence is the problem. Congress capped how early the Commission can approve and left the timing of a refusal wide open.
So these eight stations are now parked in a proceeding where, for the next two to five years, the only outcome the law actually permits is one that hurts them. Either the agency issues a Hearing Designation Order and runs them through an administrative hearing with no deadline for resolution, or it denies outright. ABC’s lawyers borrowed a line from Justice Marshall for this, about the value of a sword of Damocles being that it hangs rather than that it drops, and I think they picked the right image. I spent fifteen years next to people whose lives got reorganized by an open case that never went anywhere. The pressure shows up the day the case opens, not the day it ends, and it changes what you are willing to do in the meantime.
Carr’s side
Broadcasters get free use of a valuable public resource, and in exchange they carry public interest obligations that a podcast or a cable channel or a newspaper does not. The Commission has renewal authority. Its own regulations, at 47 C.F.R. § 73.3539(c), permit calling applications up ahead of schedule. And the employment discrimination investigation into Disney opened in March 2025, a full six months before anyone was arguing about Jimmy Kimmel, which cuts against reading the whole thing as a Kimmel reprisal.
Against that, section 326 of the same statute says the Commission shall have no power of censorship and may impose no regulation interfering with free speech by radio. The agency has twice disclaimed the authority Carr is now asserting. When it abolished the fairness doctrine in 1987 it described the doctrine as contrary to the public interest and unconstitutional on its face. And in October 2017, the first time Trump demanded that network licenses be pulled over coverage he disliked, his own chairman Ajit Pai said the FCC has no authority to revoke a license based on the content of a newscast.
The View
The Media Bureau has spent this year probing whether The View still qualifies for the bona fide news interview exemption from the equal opportunities rule, an exemption the Bureau itself granted in a 2002 declaratory ruling that has never been disturbed. The probe started after James Talarico, a Democrat running for Senate in Texas, appeared on the show on February 2. In March the Bureau ordered KTRK in Houston to file a petition for declaratory ruling on the show’s exempt status and gave it under twenty-four hours to confirm it would, which the complaint says the Commission has never required of a licensee before.
From there it moved into the editorial process itself. A July letter demanded internal communications among the show’s bookers, segment producers, and on-air hosts about any candidate over a two-year stretch, plus the messages two named co-hosts sent their executive producer about one specific booking, plus an itemized four-year list of political donations by individual employees. Two weeks later another letter extended the demand to editorial standards across Good Morning America, This Week, and World News Tonight.
ABC told the court what all of that has produced. No candidate has appeared on The View since February. The show has also stopped airing clips it otherwise would have run in Hot Topics and in the cold open, because the FCC might treat a clip as an appearance. Carr, for his part, has said he sees no reason to enforce the same equal opportunities rule against talk radio.
Nexstar-TEGNA, in the order it actually happened
I have been covering this merger for months and the version circulating right now has the sequence backwards. People are saying the FCC killed the 39 percent national ownership cap to clear the way for Nexstar to buy TEGNA. What happened is worse than that.
Congress wrote the cap into federal law in 2004, after the Commission tried to raise the limit to 45 percent and got overruled. In March 2026 the Media Bureau waived it for Nexstar and cleared the merger without a vote of the full Commission, and the deal closed on March 19. DirecTV had sued the evening before. Eight state attorneys general filed the next day. On April 17 Chief Judge Troy Nunley in the Eastern District of California entered a preliminary injunction ordering Nexstar to hold TEGNA separate, finding the plaintiffs likely to succeed on their Clayton Act section 7 claims. Nexstar has appealed and trial is set for 2027.
Eleven days after that injunction, the same Commission hauled ABC’s eight licenses up for early review.
Then on August 6 it voted 2-1 to delete the cap outright. Commissioner Anna Gomez called the decision unlawful on its face, on the ground that Congress set the number in federal law and only Congress can change it, and she made a point of naming the Republicans who agree with her: Mike O’Rielly, who used to sit on the Commission and has been unequivocal that it lacks the authority; Tom DeLay, who negotiated the 39 percent compromise as House Majority Leader and says Congress wrote it in specifically to keep the FCC’s hands off it; and Ted Cruz, who chairs Senate Commerce and has said he doubts it can be done without legislation. Gomez also pointed at the waiver and the injunction together as the warning nobody heeded.
None of that August vote helps Nexstar with its antitrust problem, which is being litigated somewhere else entirely. What the vote accomplished was retiring a number that applied to every broadcaster the same way and handing the chairman a case-by-case review he conducts himself, deal by deal, on grounds he supplies.
The affiliation inquiry runs on the same instinct. Carr is threatening to insert the FCC into negotiations between the big four networks and their local affiliates, and has suggested renewals could turn on how those deals come out, even though affiliation agreements are ordinary commercial contracts over carriage fees, programming, and exclusivity, and no license changes hands in any of them. Twenty-one conservative and free-market groups, Americans for Tax Reform among them, wrote to him this month saying renewal should not become a tool for influencing lawful private negotiations. A coalition led by the Center for Individual Freedom had already told him the same thing in July, warning that turning renewal into a discretionary checkpoint hands every future Commission a lever it will eventually pull against conservative and religious broadcasters. He keeps hearing it from his own side and keeps going.
What to watch
The ABC case will move fastest, because a TRO motion forces the court to say something soon. It is American Broadcasting Companies, Inc. v. FCC, No. 1:26-cv-02902, in the District of Columbia.
Then the Hearing Designation Order, if it comes. The comment period on the renewals closed August 5 with more than 150,000 comments in MB Docket No. 26-131, overwhelmingly in support of the stations, and Bloomberg reported the Commission was planning to move before Labor Day.
Somebody will sue over the cap repeal. When that happens, the argument Gomez laid out on August 6 is the argument the challengers will use.
The documents
Complaint, American Broadcasting Companies, Inc. v. FCC, No. 1:26-cv-02902 (D.D.C.), filed Aug. 18, 2026 — 46 pages
Commissioner Gomez on the Aug. 6 ownership cap vote — FCC
Preliminary injunction, In re Nexstar-TEGNA Merger Litigation, No. 2:26-cv-00976-TLN-CKD (E.D. Cal.), Apr. 17, 2026 — NY AG
License renewal docket — FCC ECFS, MB Docket No. 26-131
