Legal experts say Disney is likely to have the law backing it in its challenge to the atypical broadcast license review the Federal Communications Commission ordered yesterday.
Congress in 1996 made it far more difficult for the FCC to revoke a broadcast license, even during renewal. “Since the NAB [National Association of Broadcasters] got an amendment in the 1996 Telecommunications Act, denying renewal to a broadcaster faces an almost insurmountable burden,” Andrew Jay Schwartzman, senior counselor of the Benton Institute for Broadband & Society, told Ars this week.
The Telecommunications Act of 1996 was a significant overhaul of the Communications Act, the 1934 statute that created the FCC and provides the agency with its legal authority.
“Although the FCC generally acts under the ‘public interest’ standard when granting and regulating licenses, the Act imposes more limits on FCC actions that would cancel licenses or deny their renewal or transfer,” Northwestern University law professor James Speta wrote last year in the Yale Journal on Regulation. That Yale Journal piece responded to earlier threats to ABC from Trump and Carr.
The key change in 1996 was that “Congress eliminated the former process of comparative renewal hearings, under which broadcasters would have to show that their offerings are the best among any others seeking to take over the license,” Speta wrote. “The Act also generally requires that, before a license can be revoked, the FCC establish, on the basis of evidence, that the licensee has engaged in ‘willful or repeated’ violations of the Act, FCC rules, or its license.”
Early renewal is an infrequently used tactic
As previously reported, yesterday the FCC issued an order directing Disney, ABC’s owner, to file early license renewal applications for all of its licensed TV stations by May 28. The order arrived a day after President Trump and the first lady urged ABC to fire Jimmy Kimmel over a recent joke that Melania Trump looked like an “expectant widow.” Kimmel made the remark during a skit in which he pretended to deliver a roast at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner.
