A decision by the Walt Disney Company’s ABC to not pre-empt prime-time programming in order to carry President Donald Trump’s address to the nation last week will factor into an ongoing investigation at the Federal Communications Commission into Disney’s eight local TV broadcast licenses, the head of the agency affirmed on Wednesday.
During a hastily-arranged press conference, FCC Chairman Brendan Carr said the agency will weigh ABC’s decision to not air the speech as part of its overall consideration on an application to renew the broadcast licenses of ABC’s local TV stations in New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, Fresno, San Francisco, Raleigh-Durham, Houston and Philadelphia.
In April, the FCC’s Media Bureau ordered Disney to renew the broadcast licenses earlier than planned, following a year-long probe into the company’s purported use of diversity and equity programs in its hiring and promotional practices. Some of its broadcast licenses were valid for several more years.
Disney submitted the renewal applications under protest, calling the order “unlawful, arbitrary and unconstitutional.” The company later used its stations to encourage viewers to submit comments to the FCC.
Trump’s prime-time address restated a number of conspiracy theories related to the outcome of the 2020 presidential election, which he lost. During the speech, Trump accused ABC and NBC of engaging in election-related misinformation by choosing not to air the speech on their local broadcast stations and affiliates.
ABC News and NBC News streamed the speech on their free online channels, and ABC and NBC stations and affiliates were free to produce their own coverage and take the speech live, according to people familiar with the matter. Sinclair, which owns a number of ABC and NBC affiliates across the country, opted to pre-empt local and national programming by covering Trump’s speech with a broadcast produced by The National Desk, its national news program.
Broadcast companies that own local ABC and NBC affiliates are not part of the FCC’s ongoing probe, and Carr did not say whether separate action was being considered against NBC’s parent company Comcast, which is in the process of spinning out the broadcast network and related assets.
“I think that when you have the president of the United States standing inside the White House delivering an important speech, I think that’s something that broadcasters should be carrying,” Carr said on Wednesday.
FCC Commissioner Anna Gomez, the agency’s sole Democratic member, challenged Carr’s interpretation and said broadcasters retain editorial discretion over whether to carry presidential remarks.
“It is not for the FCC to tell broadcasters how to make their editorial decisions or what content to place on their networks or their local broadcast stations,” Gomez said in a statement.
Gomez said a station or network’s decision over its news coverage is protected speech and cannot be compelled by the president, the FCC or anyone else. By pressuring networks to carry a speech that they otherwise would not air, Gomez said the FCC was engaging in de facto censorship.
The FCC’s probe into ABC’s broadcast licenses is separate from another investigation involving the network’s daytime commentary program “The View,” which also involves an ABC-owned station. An interview with Texas Representative James Talarico in February has sparked questions over whether The View qualifies as a news program for purposes of an FCC exemption into its long-standing “equal time” rules, which require broadcasters offer competing candidates an opportunity to address viewers on their stations.
Gomez said the FCC’s Media Bureau contacted a number of independently-owned ABC affiliates saying they should Talarico’s interview in their public inspection files, but never afforded the same opportunity to ABC-owned KTRK (Channel 13) in Houston. The FCC then used the lack of disclosure by KTRK against the station, even though the Media Bureau concocted the situation through their own omission, Gomez asserts.
