By Brian Stelter, Liam Reilly, CNN
(CNN) — ABC is laying the groundwork for a landmark First Amendment fight.
On Thursday, ABC filed paperwork to renew its local TV station licenses “under protest in response to an unlawful, arbitrary, and unconstitutional order” by the Federal Communications Commission.
ABC attached an extraordinary objection letter that accused the Trump-aligned agency of using “unconstitutional retaliation and coercion” to threaten speech.
The filings came one month after the FCC ordered ABC to submit renewal applications for all eight of its owned stations, even though the current licenses don’t expire for years. It was the latest escalation in the agency’s months-long attempt to pressure ABC and its parent company Disney.
“The only plausible reason to issue the order is to punish the station for speech the government does not like,” ABC argued in Thursday’s letter.
FCC chairman Brendan Carr did not immediately respond to a request for comment. He has previously claimed that the license challenge is part of an ongoing FCC probe into Disney’s diversity initiatives.
The FCC’s lone Democratic commissioner, Anna Gomez, rejected that claim and urged Disney to defend itself against the Trump administration’s attacks.
“Disney and its ABC stations are the latest victims of this administration’s campaign of censorship and control,” Gomez wrote on X Thursday. “I am glad to see them expose the FCC’s actions as nothing more than naked political retribution and an unlawful assault on free speech and a free press.”
Since President Donald Trump’s reelection, the FCC has repeatedly pursued ABC, despite having limited enforcement power. Carr has scrutinized ABC’s relationships with local affiliates; opened an investigation into Disney’s DEI practices; issued a threat over a joke made by Jimmy Kimmel; and opened a probe into whether “The View” violated a so-called “equal-time” rule.
As the pressure accumulated and as Trump renewed his push to get Kimmel fired last month, ABC executives prepared to defend the stations on First Amendment grounds.
Disney retained the prominent conservative attorney and Supreme Court litigator Paul Clement, who filed a letter to the FCC on May 7 saying the government was posing a broad threat to free speech with its inquiry into “The View.”
Thursday’s response regarding the station licenses was unsigned, but it conveyed a similar message. Legal experts say the responses seem to be written in anticipation of a future court battle.
The ABC letter noted that the FCC “had not demanded early renewal in over five decades” and had “never before demanded simultaneous license renewal applications from a group of stations commonly owned with a network.”
The order “is inconsistent with a legitimate exercise of investigative authority and is plainly incompatible with the First Amendment,” ABC wrote. “Worse, the order opens the door to an assault on the station’s license, while the commission searches for a legal pretext to achieve its desired goal.”
The true purpose of the early-renewal order, ABC added, was “to suppress speech — to ramp up toward possible license revocation and cause the station and others to think twice before they say something the government might dislike.”
The letter concluded, “When a broadcaster must weigh regulatory retaliation before making editorial decisions, the public loses access to journalism that is free from government influence.”
Hours before ABC filed the license paperwork, the FCC published a public notice about the “public interest” obligations that broadcasters must meet.
It was another flexing of power by Carr, who said “the agency will take appropriate actions to ensure compliance,” even though the “public interest” standard has been ill-defined for decades.
In response to that notice, Gomez asserted that broadcasters should “ignore these latest threats and stiffen their spine.”
“Pushing back is the only thing that will stop this FCC from abusing its power to silence speech and punish independent reporting,” Gomez wrote.
ABC also filed public-interest statements for each of its eight stations on Thursday, listing page after page of contributions to the communities it broadcasts in.
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