Conservative fight against license renewals for ABC stations heats up

The groups have complained about TV host Jimmy Kimmel, seen here at the Oscars in Los Angeles, California, on 15 March. Photograph: Mike Blake/Reuters View image in fullscreen The groups have complained about TV host Jimmy Kimmel, seen here at the Oscars in Los Angeles, California, on 15 March. Photograph: Mike Blake/Reuters Conservative fight against license renewals for ABC stations heats up Prominent organizations accuse network of political, racial and sexual bias and supporting Chinese communist party 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. “ABC ignores long-standing Commission precedents and principles protecting the integrity of the news,” the group wrote. “ABC engages in explicit racial and gender discrimination. ABC cozies up to the Communist Chinese Party and airbrushes over religious and ethnic cleansing. ABC fails to respect this Commission’s rules.” The organization lobbied the FCC to deny ABC’s renewal requests and to call the matter for a hearing, “because the Petition and accompanying materials raise sufficient questions [about] whether ABC is operating in the public interest or remains worthy of the public trust”. The Media Research Center, a non-profit conservative media watchdog group, filed a petition to deny the network’s license renewal requests “because of ABC’s continued and sustained abuse of the licenses subject to the current review, its notorious efforts to improperly influence national elections, and its willful eng