FCC orders review of ABC licenses after Jimmy Kimmel’s Melania Trump joke

In a statement, a Disney spokesperson acknowledged that the company has received notice of the expedited renewal process. “ABC and its stations have a long record of operating in full compliance with FCC rules and serving their local communities with trusted news, emergency information and public‑interest programming,” the spokesperson said. “We are confident that record demonstrates our continued qualifications as licensees under the Communications Act and the first amendment and are prepared to show that through the appropriate legal channels. Our focus remains, as always, on serving viewers in the local communities where our stations operate.”

On a conservative podcast published Tuesday, Carr weighed in on the DEI-related investigation and said “there’s evidence that Disney has been pretty bad. There’s evidence suggests that Disney literally was dividing and categorizing employees based on race and gender, and potentially – we’ll see what the evidence establishes, ultimately – giving different opportunities to people based on their race or gender or other protected class. And we’re going to get some more discovery from Disney on that. But that could raise character questions about the company long-term.”

Carr, on the podcast, said that license renewals can be “accelerated” if there are “significant concerns” about how a network is operating, and questions about whether it is doing so in the public interest. If the FCC determines that a broadcaster is in violation, the next step would be a hearing designation, which Carr said was a “multi-month process”.

Anna M Gomez, the lone Democrat on the FCC, has decried any attempt to speed up the license renewal process for ABC – or any other television network that has been targeted by the Trump administration. “This is unprecedented, unlawful, and going nowhere,” she wrote in a post on X on Tuesday. “This political stunt won’t stick. Companies should challenge it head-on. The First Amendment is on their side.”

In an interview with the Guardian last month, Gomez said the license renewal apparatus is intentionally onerous and time-consuming to prevent any appearance of partisan decision-making.

“If they are trying to take adverse action through the license renewal process, that is an arduous, long, process with multi-layers of decisions that have to be made by different parties that are meant to protect broadcasters from capricious and arbitrary action from the commission,” Gomez said.

Tom Wheeler, who served as chairman of the FCC during Barack Obama’s presidency, told the Guardian on Tuesday that Carr “has turned [the FCC] into a political organization using policy to achieve political goals,” rather than “a policy agency operating in a political environment.”

While Wheeler said that Carr has the ability to schedule consideration of ABC’s license renewals, any adverse decision would ultimately be appealable – and he noted that license denials are exceedingly rare.

Wheeler said that a denial of ABC’s licenses “would have a hard time at the courts”, though he doesn’t see that as the goal. “There are two message: there’s a message that goes to the Maga base that says, ‘Boy, I’m going at them.’ There’s a message that goes to the president that says, ‘Boy am I carrying forth what you want me to do.’ And then there’s a message to every licensee of the FCC that says, ‘I can do this to you too.’”

In February, Carr confirmed that the FCC is also investigating the ABC daytime talkshow The View for a potential violation of rules around providing equal time for opposing political candidates.

Despite calls by Trump and his wife for ABC to take action against Kimmel, his show aired as scheduled on Monday night. “It was a very light roast joke about the fact that he’s almost 80 and she’s younger than I am,” Kimmel explained to viewers. “It was not – by any stretch of the definition – a call to assassination. And they know that. I’ve been very vocal for many years, speaking out against gun violence, in particular.”

In September, Carr pressured television station groups to pre-empt Kimmel’s show as punishment for a comment that he made in the wake of the assassination of conservative influencer Charlie Kirk. Two right-leaning broadcast groups, Sinclair and Nexstar, did so, and ABC opted to “indefinitely” pull Kimmel’s show. Kimmel ultimately returned to the air a week later. Carr later claimed that his comments about Kimmel’s show did not amount to a threat.

Seth Stern, chief of advocacy for Freedom of the Press Foundation, issued a statement on Tuesday calling out Carr’s FCC. “The FCC is neither the journalism police nor the humor police,” he said. “This is nothing but illegal jawboning intended to intimidate ABC into kissing the ring.”

“The FCC has no authority to cancel broadcasters’ licenses because of their perceived political views. But this isn’t just about the rights of Disney and ABC. President Trump is trying to consolidate control over what Americans see and hear on the radio, television, and social media,” Jameel Jaffer, executive director at the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University, said in a statement.

“If he gets his way, we’ll have only government-aligned media organizations that broadcast only government-approved news and commentary. It would be difficult to imagine an outcome more corrosive to democracy or more offensive to the first amendment.”