Democratic FCC commissioner says Trump ABC threat would fail in court

By David Shepardson

WASHINGTON (Reuters) -A Democratic member of the Federal Communications Commission said on Thursday that calls by President Donald Trump to urge the agency to rescind licenses held by ABC stations would fail in court.

Trump on Tuesday said broadcasting licenses used by affiliates of Walt Disney’s ABC should be “taken away” after the Republican president objected to a question posed by a reporter for the network. FCC Commissioner Anna Gomez said any effort to revoke licenses over a reporter’s question would not pass legal muster.

“The FCC is powerless to truly retaliate against a news network. National networks do not have broadcast licenses, the stations they own do, but none of these licenses is up for renewal anytime soon,” Gomez said.

Asked how he would respond to Trump’s call to pull ABC station licenses, Republican FCC Chairman Brendan Carr on Thursday reiterated his view of the need to reinvigorate public interest standards for broadcasters, adding: “We are always open minded.”

The FCC, an independent federal agency, issues eight-year licenses to individual broadcast stations, not networks.

Carr on Wednesday said he was opening a review of agreements between national networks and local broadcast station owners and wants to make it easier for local broadcasters to opt not to air national programming if it is not in the public interest.

Disney did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Gomez said the FCC threats were hollow.

“If the FCC were to take the unprecedented step to revoke a license on the grounds that reporting by a network is unfavorable to this administration, it would run headlong into the First Amendment and fail in court,” she said. “This FCC cannot and will not succeed in its efforts to censor speech and control the media.”

Carr has taken a series of steps to investigate media companies. In July, he opened a probe into NBC-parent Comcast’s relationships with its local broadcast TV affiliates.

In January, Carr reinstated complaints about how ABC News moderated the pre-election TV debate between then-President Joe Biden and Trump, and appearances by Vice President and Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris on CBS’s “60 Minutes” and NBC’s “Saturday Night Live.”

(Reporting by David Shepardson; Editing by Franklin Paul and Bill Berkrot)