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A cardinal rule of journalism: never back down in the face of intimidation. And yet, in a lawsuit filed in August by ABC and its parent, Disney, in the US District Court for the District of Columbia, lawyers argued that for months, as the Trump administration “steadily increased the pressure on ABC,” the actions of the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) effectively undermined the network’s First Amendment rights. In the filing, ABC says that led to self-censorship—a seemingly unprecedented admission, and an untested legal strategy for a media organization.
ABC gives two examples. First, there’s The View. In February, after James Talarico, a Texas Democrat running for Senate, appeared as a guest, the FCC opened an investigation into possible violations of a rule that entertainment shows must provide an opportunity for opposing political candidates to request equal time. The View has long argued that it’s “a bona fide news program,” and therefore exempt from that requirement, which the FCC had formally recognized for two decades. Nevertheless, “the process for evaluating potential guests for The View has changed,” according to the complaint. “ABC must evaluate any invitation to a political candidate for its potential consequences.” Since February, not a single contender for public office has appeared on The View—though Karoline Leavitt, the outgoing White House press secretary, has been invited.
The probe required ABC to provide emails and other documentation about its internal decision-making. Brendan Carr, the chair of the FCC, said that, as the materials arrived, “we decided to take that next step.” That may have been, but the timing also coincided with Jimmy Kimmel making a joke on his late-night show about Donald and Melania Trump. They promptly demanded that ABC punish him; the next day, the FCC ordered eight local stations owned by ABC to file early applications to renew their licenses. The FCC cited concern about an alleged application of diversity, equity, and inclusion policies. In its complaint, ABC calls this line of attack “pretextual.” Whatever the case, “with the threat of non-renewal or revocation of its Stations’ broadcast licenses on the line,” the filing states, “ABC cannot ignore the consequences of any decision that might anger the Administration or the FCC Chairman.”
This is made plain by the second example. In July, Trump announced that he would be giving a prime-time address to the nation. ABC decided not to broadcast the address live—but because the network “was aware that the President wanted the address to be broadcast live, and considered the risk of resulting Administration retaliation,” ABC ultimately decided to air the speech on its livestream, “which it ordinarily would not have done.” The complaint notes that the network adhered to its editorial standards; ABC declined to comment further to me. Even so, as Andrew Schwartzman, a senior counselor at the Benton Institute for Broadband and Society, observed, the case presents a forthright acknowledgment that government pressure influenced coverage. “There has been a strong redline against interfering in the editorial judgment of a licensed broadcaster,” he said. “In order to show harm, they had to open the bathrobe.”
Depending on whom you ask, ABC’s confession to the court is either a savvy legal maneuver that strengthens its First Amendment claim and reveals a hidden problem or a troubling capitulation to government pressure. (Carr has called the case “meritless.”) Lucy Dalglish—a journalist and lawyer, as well as a former dean of the Philip Merrill College of Journalism at the University of Maryland, where she now teaches—believes that the decision to confess to self-censorship is likely painful to ABC journalists and could be perceived as reputationally damaging. “Lucy the journalist gets that,” she told me. “Lucy the lawyer is saying, ‘We can’t let this attack on the First Amendment keep going like this. We have to stop it, and we have to stop it now.’”
Seth Stern, the chief of advocacy at the Freedom of the Press Foundation, suggested that coming forward this way may open the door for other media organizations facing similar intimidation to follow. “This is likely happening not only with outlets that Carr directly targets, like ABC, but with all licensees reporting on topics that he has said will be scrutinized by the FCC under the public interest standard, like the Iran war, immigration enforcement, and presidential speeches,” he told me. “I think he sometimes directs his threats to the market at large precisely because intimidating any one licensee is not sufficient to accomplish his objectives.”
Richard Tofel, the former president of ProPublica and author of Second Rough Draft, an influential Substack on media, feels differently. Though Tofel praises ABC and Disney for challenging the administration’s actions now, he believes they erred in their earlier coverage decisions. “Whatever one thinks about the behavior of the government, placing business considerations ahead of your best editorial judgment is really disappointing,” he told me. “And it’s especially appalling in a company that makes billions of dollars a year in profit.”
The lawsuit claims that the potential loss of station licenses represents an existential threat to ABC and Disney. “The licenses are really the Achilles’ heel of the large media conglomerate,” Gabe Rottman, who leads policy work at the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press, said. The FCC’s targeting of these stations has been especially significant because, according to the filing, “until the day before that order was issued, the Commission had not called for a renewal application ahead of schedule in more than half a century. Nor had it ever demanded simultaneous early renewal applications from a group of stations commonly owned with a single broadcast network.” But as Schwartzman told me, the risk of the stations’ actually losing their licenses anytime soon is remote: under the law, stations can continue to operate while litigation is ongoing, a process that could take a decade.
Schwartzman also pointed out that Disney—as a large corporation with multiple commercial interests, from theme parks to entertainment—has a fiduciary obligation to act in the best interest of its shareholders and can’t just take a stand on principle. The court challenge is, in that sense, a means of putting up a fight that can take place within corporate constraints. “They are balancing all manner of larger corporate priorities,” Schwartzman said. Litigating aggressively, he told me, is a way of saying, “We’re not going to take this crap anymore.”
Despite the strength of the evidence in the filing, the case is hardly a slam dunk: according to a number of legal experts, there are complex procedural hurdles, including concerns of standing—the right to take legal action based on experiencing a concrete harm. The Supreme Court has long held that, because the FCC is tasked with administering the airwaves in the public interest, it can take actions that in other instances would violate the First Amendment.
As Tofel has written for CJR, this lawsuit is not ABC’s only recent legal confrontation with Trump: in late 2024, the company paid sixteen million dollars to settle a libel case brought by Trump. That outcome did not prevent threats from Carr (“We can do this the easy way or the hard way,” as he put it), prompting ABC to pull Kimmel from the air for several days over comments about Charlie Kirk, the conservative influencer who was shot and killed. And at the end of last year, when Mary Bruce, the chief White House correspondent for ABC, questioned Trump in the Oval Office, he replied: “I’ll tell you something, I think the license should be taken away from ABC, because your news is so fake and it’s so wrong.” Carr, he added, “should look at that.”
And even if ABC’s admission of succumbing to government pressure strengthens its legal position, it is also a troubling recognition that the Trump administration’s intimidation campaign is, on some level, working. How should news organizations respond when their rights are threatened? I put the question to Stephen Adler, the director of the Ethics and Journalism Initiative at New York University, who told me that, in the face of the extraordinary leverage exercised by the FCC, the “networks are scared out of their wits.” He equated the mentality at ABC to that of a media organization threatened with a major libel suit.
Stern finds it encouraging that, given the mounting political pressure, ABC is willing to fight back at all. “I don’t really think it’s a realistic portrayal of the media at large to say that self-censorship is this redline that nobody ever crosses,” he said. “Everyone’s susceptible to pressure. Journalists are human. We might be better off just sort of acknowledging that these things do have an impact and stop pretending that we’re these infallible messengers of truth.”
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