Conservative fight against license renewals for ABC stations heats up
Source: The Guardian
Mon 6 Jul 2026 07.00 EDT
Last modified on Mon 6 Jul 2026 10.06 EDT
A group of prominent conservative organizations has petitioned the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) to deny license renewal requests from the eight local television stations owned and operated by ABC, accusing the network of political, racial and sexual bias and supporting the Chinese communist party.
The petitions come after the commission, led by Trump appointee Brendan Carr, took the nearly unprecedented step of requiring the network, a frequent recipient of attacks from Donald Trump, to apply several years early to maintain its ability to broadcast in markets around the country.
While Carr has said the early license renewal process stems from an FCC investigation into ABC’s diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) efforts, petitioners are free to include a variety of grievances against the network and concerns about whether ABC is operating in the public interest.
The petitions – part of an open process that allows anyone to argue that ABC is not fit to hold publicly owned television licenses – came from groups like the Center for American Rights, which has played a significant role during Carr’s tenure atop the FCC agency as an initiator of complaints against major broadcast television networks. In a petition to deny filed last Monday, the group said the stations were not being operated “in the public interest” in part because ABC’s programs “show a consistent and overt partisan bias”, citing the group’s past complaints about late-night host Jimmy Kimmel and the network’s moderation of a 2024 presidential debate, among other concerns.
Read more: https://www.theguardian.com/media/2026/jul/06/abc-license-renewals-fcc
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SOME DU CONTEXT
https://www.democraticunderground.com/10141768936
https://www.democraticunderground.com/10142027761
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If they try anything else it end up in the courts and be shot down. 
