Seemingly unconfident in their last-minute write-in campaign from fans, ABC and Disney launched a last-minute lawsuit on Tuesday seeking an injunction against the Federal Communications Commission. The suit aims to halt the FCC’s early review of broadcast licenses for eight Disney-owned local affiliates as well as a review of The View’s purported status as a so-called “bona fide news program.”
Disney claims the FCC has been violating their First Amendment rights as part of a “retaliatory campaign against ABC.”
“Acting through the Federal Communications Commission, the Administration has waged a retaliatory campaign against ABC for a single reason: it disapproves of what ABC broadcasts,” the filing asserted. “Plaintiffs come to the Court reluctantly with no alternative means to eliminate these ongoing and immediate threats other than total capitulation to the administration’s demands.”
Simply put, the evidence is indisputable that what ABC has placed on the airwaves has run counter to the very definition of acting in the public interest (and on The View in particular as a “bona fide news program”).
“The House of Mouse is acting like a cornered rat,” Media Research Center President David Bozell stated about the lawsuit. “Disney’s ABC has spent years treating its broadcast licenses like permanent entitlements rather than privileges conditioned on serving the public interest. Now it is suing to stop the FCC from even examining whether it has lived up to those obligations. ABC wants all the benefits of using the public airwaves, but none of the scrutiny that comes with them.”
The Media Research Center has been a driving force behind efforts to hold Disney and ABC News accountable for abuses of the public airwaves, both via a petition to bar renewal of their broadcast licenses, and a lengthy filing documenting The View’s abuses of that license.
“ABC’s opposition to the MRC petition effectively boils down to a ‘squatters rights’ argument,” Bozell stated earlier this month, in a response to ABC & Disney’s argument for renewal. “Someone else may own the property, have the statutory right to license the property, and bear the responsibility to ensure the property is well maintained, but ABC seems to believe it has an entitlement to control the property in perpetuity.”
He added: “But broadcast spectrum is publicly owned, and a license to use it is a limited-term privilege conditioned on compliance with statutory and contractual obligations.”
As NewsBusters previously reported, ABC, Disney, and their defenders have floundered in their rebuttals to the FCC and the MRC. They largely ignore the over 2,400 pieces of evidence of their abuses.
The evidence pointed to electioneering for their political interests, the spreading of misinformation, the promotion of political violence, and the general abdication of working in the public interest.
