When the guy Ronald Reagan put in charge of the FCC calls your media crackdown unconstitutional, you have officially lost the argument. A coalition of former FCC chairs and senior officials, appointed by presidents from both parties, filed a blistering response Tuesday to the Trump administration's effort to pull ABC's broadcast licenses, calling the whole thing a 'grave violation' of the Constitution and a deliberate attempt to threaten every broadcaster in America into submission.
Who Exactly Is Saying This
This is not a letter from a bunch of Democratic Party operatives. The Guardian reports the coalition includes Mark S. Fowler, FCC chair under Ronald Reagan; Alfred C. Sikes, FCC chair under George H.W. Bush; Thomas E. Wheeler, FCC chair under Barack Obama; and a roster of senior lawyers and advisers who collectively have more institutional knowledge of broadcast law than everyone currently running the Carr FCC combined.
These are not people who agree on much. Reagan's FCC chair and Obama's FCC chair sharing a filing is the regulatory equivalent of finding a note that reads 'we don't care what side you're on, this is just wrong.' When you've managed to unify the ghost of Reaganomics with Obama-era technocrats, you've done something genuinely remarkable. Unfortunately, what you've done is try to use the federal government to punish a news network for covering the news.
How We Got Here
Back in late April, FCC Chairman Brendan Carr issued what The Guardian describes as an 'extremely unusual order' putting ABC's broadcast licenses up for early renewal. The timing was not subtle. It followed public criticism of ABC by Donald Trump and Melania Trump, which is the kind of coincidence that only a very credulous person would call a coincidence.
Eight local ABC television stations now have their licenses in active jeopardy. Interested parties have until August 5th to file replies to the renewal petitions, after which the FCC could schedule hearings. There is no clear timetable for resolution, which is itself the point. ABC and its local stations get to sit in bureaucratic purgatory, wondering whether they'll be allowed to keep broadcasting, while the chilling effect does its quiet work on every other newsroom in the country watching from a distance.
The Petitions Doing the Dirty Work
The actual license challenges come from two conservative organizations: the Media Research Center and the Center for American Rights. According to The Guardian, CAR has a close alignment with Chairman Carr himself and has filed multiple complaints against television networks based on accusations of liberal bias. Their petition against ABC accused the network of ignoring commission precedents and engaging in 'explicit racial and gender discrimination.'
The former officials' filing addressed this directly, arguing the petitions ask the FCC to punish a network for its editorial decision-making, which they called a 'stunning and plainly unconstitutional expansion of the Commission's role.' In plain English: you cannot yank a broadcaster's license because you think their news coverage has the wrong politics. That's not regulating the airwaves. That's state censorship with extra steps.
What the Filing Actually Says
The coalition did not mince words. The Guardian quotes the group calling this 'the latest attack in a sustained campaign by Chairman Carr and the Trump administration of threatening legal sanctions against licensees whose speech President Trump dislikes.' They called the early renewal proceeding 'unprecedented in the history of the Federal Communications Commission.'
They also invoked the FCC's own statutory prohibition on censorship, which is written directly into the Communications Act. 'We call on the Commission to respect the constitutional and congressional prohibitions on its power of censorship and terminate this proceeding,' the group wrote. That's a former Reagan appointee telling a Trump appointee that what he's doing violates a law that has existed for decades. It doesn't get more damning than that, and it doesn't require any partisan spin to read it that way.
The Chilling Effect Is Already Working
Here's what the license review accomplishes even if it never results in ABC losing a single station. Every local news director, every network executive, every broadcast journalist now understands the game. Cover this administration aggressively and you might spend the next several years in a federal licensing proceeding with no clear end date and enormous legal costs. The threat does not have to succeed. It just has to exist.
The former officials named this directly. Their filing states the FCC is trying to 'send a chilling message to all broadcasters: carry speech we don't like at your peril.' That sentence was written by people who spent careers inside the FCC and know exactly how its power can be weaponized. They are describing what they see happening with the calm, specific language of people who have never had to use that language before, because nothing like this has happened before.
The Dingo Take
Let's be clear about what the Trump administration is attempting here. They are using the federal licensing process, a mechanism that exists to manage spectrum allocation and ensure broadcasters serve the public interest, as a political weapon against a news network whose coverage the president does not like. This is not a close call. It is not a nuanced regulatory dispute. It is the government threatening to shut down television stations because of their journalism, and former officials from Ronald Reagan's own administration are saying so out loud in a federal filing.
Brendan Carr's FCC has shown consistent interest in making life difficult for media organizations that don't play ball with the current administration. But the ABC case is the most naked version of that effort yet. There's no technical violation at issue, no public safety concern, no legitimate regulatory problem being addressed. There is a president who is angry about his coverage, and a commission chair who appears willing to use the machinery of federal licensing to do something about it. Those are the facts.
The coalition of former officials ended their filing by calling on the FCC to 'terminate this proceeding.' They will probably be ignored. Carr has shown no interest in the judgment of the people who held his job before him, and this administration has shown no interest in any principle that inconveniences it. But the filing is now part of the record, and the record matters. When this ends up in court, which it will, a panel of judges is going to read Reagan's FCC chair calling this unconstitutional and work backward from there. The only real question is how much damage gets done in the meantime.
