Disney sues FCC and its chair, escalating fight against Trump’s chief censor

Disney today sued the Federal Communications Commission and FCC Chairman Brendan Carr in a lawsuit that aims to stop what it called a “campaign of censorship” waged by the Trump administration against ABC.

Disney, ABC, and the eight broadcast stations they own filed a complaint in US District Court for the District of Columbia. They also submitted a motion for a temporary restraining order and preliminary injunction that would halt the FCC proceeding in which Carr is threatening to deny renewals of broadcast licenses held by ABC stations.

The lawsuit accused the FCC of violating the First Amendment by retaliating against the company’s protected expression. “Again and again, the Administration has attacked ABC’s speech—the stories its journalists report and the viewpoints its network programs air,” the lawsuit said. “Over time, those attacks have escalated into express demands that ABC be stripped of its broadcast licenses because of its speech.”

The lawsuit asked the court to halt any further actions in the early license review that Carr ordered for all eight ABC stations. In particular, it asked the court to prevent the FCC from issuing a Hearing Designation Order that would all but guarantee a negative outcome for the ABC stations.

FCC left Disney “no choice”

While ABC station licenses are scheduled for renewals between 2028 and 2031, Carr took the highly unusual step of ordering the stations to file renewal applications several years early. Revoking a license in the middle of a term has been described as somewhere between difficult and effectively impossible.

Despite the legal difficulty of revoking a license, Disney’s lawsuit said the FCC could use a hearing “to deny license renewal or immediately revoke the Stations’ licenses, forcing Plaintiffs off the air entirely, as the President has repeatedly demanded.” Even if the FCC doesn’t go that far, it can “mir[e] ABC in years of costly litigation, with the threat of adverse action ever present and with every editorial judgment shadowed by the prospect of provoking the Administration into further retaliation,” the lawsuit said.

“Facing this existential threat, Plaintiffs have no choice but to seek redress from the judicial branch for the Administration’s blatant retaliation for their First Amendment speech,” the lawsuit said. “Plaintiffs come to this Court reluctantly with no alternative means to eliminate these ongoing and immediate threats other than total capitulation to the Administration’s demands.”

Carr ordered the review of ABC’s broadcast licenses in April, one day after Trump and the first lady called on ABC to fire Jimmy Kimmel over a joke in which he said Melania Trump looked like an “expectant widow.” The Carr FCC claims the license review is necessary because ABC’s diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) practices may violate anti-discrimination rules.

The Carr-led FCC today accused Disney of spreading disinformation.

“All broadcasters have a legal obligation to operate in the public interest—even Disney,” an FCC spokesperson said in a statement provided to Ars. “The FCC has been examining claims that Disney engaged in illegal DEI discrimination for over a year. Disney is obviously very concerned about the FCC’s proceeding, as evidenced by their ongoing campaign of disinformation as well as their decision to ask a court to stop the FCC from further pursuing matters. The FCC will continue to follow the facts and law wherever they lead.”

FCC Democrat roots Disney on

In addition to Carr, Disney’s lawsuit names the other FCC commissioners as defendants. That includes Democrat Anna Gomez, though Gomez has consistently fought Carr’s attacks on ABC and spoke out in support of Disney’s lawsuit. Disney even cited some of Gomez’s comments to support its argument about the Trump administration.

“For months, the FCC has waged a campaign of censorship and control against Disney’s ABC stations, using the threat of broadcast license revocations to punish a company for speech this administration doesn’t like,” Gomez said in a statement today. “I have long called on companies to push back against this kind of government intimidation, and I’m glad Disney has shown courage and stepped up. This should be a welcome sign for every broadcaster who has felt the weight of this overreaching government pressure in silence.”

The Disney lawsuit gives a history of the Trump administration’s attacks on ABC. It notes that after the 2024 presidential election debate hosted by ABC, Trump accused ABC moderators of bias and repeatedly called for ABC to lose broadcast licenses. After winning the election, Trump chose Carr to take the FCC chairmanship and Carr “has likewise agreed with the President that the FCC should pursue grave remedies such as revocation when it disapproves of networks’ speech,” the lawsuit said.

The lawsuit describes the November 2025 incident in which ABC News Chief White House Correspondent Mary Bruce asked Trump why he was waiting for Congress to release the Epstein files instead of doing it himself immediately.

Trump responded, “You’re a terrible person, and a terrible reporter… I think the license should be taken away from ABC because your news is so fake, and it’s so wrong, and we have a great commissioner, a chairman, who should look at that. Because I think when you come in and when you’re 97 percent negative to Trump, and then Trump wins the election by a landslide, that means obviously your news is not credible, and you’re not credible as a reporter.”

White House called ABC “a Democrat spin operation”

The White House issued a press release the next day stating that “ABC ‘News’ is not journalism—it’s a Democrat spin operation masquerading as a broadcast network.” Carr had already threatened ABC station licenses in September 2025, saying that stations could be guilty of “news distortion” and face “fines or license revocations” if they continued to air Jimmy Kimmel’s show.

In addition to the early license review, Carr opened a proceeding in May 2026 to examine whether ABC’s The View should continue to be exempt from the equal-time rule as a “bona fide news interview program.” The FCC had been investigating the ABC show since at least February, when it aired an interview with Texas Democratic Senate candidate James Talarico.

In July, the FCC demanded that the Houston-based KTRK station “produce all internal communications among The View’s booking staff, its segment producers, its Executive Producer, and its on-air co-hosts discussing any candidate over a two-year period, together with the messages that two named cohosts had sent to the program’s Executive Producer about a single booking decision,” the lawsuit said.

The FCC letter of inquiry also “demanded that ABC disclose the political donations of individual employees and co-hosts,” the lawsuit said. Two weeks later, the FCC issued another letter making similar demands for Good Morning America, This Week with George Stephanopoulos, and ABC World News Tonight with David Muir, the lawsuit said.

“No provision of Section 315 [of the Communications Act] permits the government to demand a journalist’s or on-air anchor’s messages to her producer, to inventory her political contributions, or to audit the editorial standards of an entire news division,” the lawsuit said, adding that Carr has not initiated similar equal-time investigations into conservative talk radio stations.

The View’s speech chilled

Disney acknowledged that The View has changed its process for evaluating potential guests because of the FCC proceeding. No political candidate has appeared on the show since the February 2026 appearance of Talarico.

“Historically, decisions about which candidates or public figures to invite as guests were made based on newsworthiness, audience interest, and scheduling alone,” the lawsuit said. “Since the Bureau’s inquiry began, ABC must now evaluate any invitation to a political candidate for its potential consequences, including whether it might later be cited by the Commission as a basis for non-renewal in the Stations’ impending license renewal proceedings.”

ABC hasn’t stopped making news decisions that it knows would anger Trump, however. Last month, ABC decided not to broadcast a Trump primetime address live. “In direct response to ABC’s decision not to broadcast his address—and during the address itself—the President called for the revocation of the ABC Owned Stations’ broadcast licenses, as well as those of NBC, which had similarly chosen not to broadcast the address,” the lawsuit said.

Gomez said she hopes that Disney’s lawsuit “will mark the beginning of the end of this administration’s disregard for the Constitution and the law, and that the coming months will bring the costly legal defeat this agency has been asking for since it started down this path. It is time this administration understands that the Constitution does not bend to political convenience, and that the First Amendment protects the news and commentary Americans see on their screens even when those in power wish it didn’t.”

The Freedom of the Press Foundation also praised the lawsuit. The group recently sued Trump over Truth Social’s scheme to sell real-time access to posts from Trump for up to $100,000 a month.

“It’s about time for someone to take Carr and his FCC to court over their endless campaign of intimidation and retaliation against journalism that displeases Carr’s thin-skinned boss,” said the group’s chief of advocacy, Seth Stern. “No matter what pretexts he asserts, Carr’s modus operandi is clear: to serve as Trump’s censorship czar and abuse his office to repeatedly and exclusively target Trump’s perceived adversaries in the media, whether through sham proceedings or threatening letters and X posts. Carr knows the FCC is not the journalism police and said so regularly himself before he decided to throw away any integrity he once had to kiss up to Trump. Countless others whose First Amendment rights have been chilled by Carr’s antics should follow Disney’s lead.”

To get a temporary restraining order or preliminary injunction, Disney has to show it is likely to win the case and that it would suffer irreparable harm without a court order. In addition to describing the harm it has already suffered, Disney said the administration’s campaign against ABC will be particularly damaging during the run up to the midterm election.

“Indeed, a Commission intent on influencing coverage could hardly have chosen a more opportune moment,” Disney said. “Plaintiffs must make editorial judgments about how to cover the election in the shadow of a threatened corporate death sentence, and the Commission has every incentive to let that threat loom as long as possible. Nor can that harm be undone after the fact.”