While Disney ran to a D.C. court crying about how the Federal Communications Commission was supposedly violating their First Amendment rights over an early review of their broadcast licenses of eight of their affiliates (and a review of The View’s “bona fide news” status), their allies in the in liberal media swarmed to their side. They sung from similar sheet music as they claimed the FCC was looking to punish them for critical opinions they didn’t like from the left. However, conspicuously absent from their reports was critical opinions they didn’t like from the right.
Chief among the House of Mouse defenders was CNN chief media analyst Brian Stelter. In his Tuesday newsletter, he boasted about the stand the multinational, multibillion-dollar corporation was taking against the Trump Administration:
Today’s First Amendment lawsuit against the FCC opens with a foundational principle: “Government censorship is deeply un-American.” Then it cites a 2024 Supreme Court ruling that the government may not “use the power of the State to punish or suppress disfavored expression.”
Here are the “three key quotes from the filing” as championed by Stelter (Click “expand”)
>> The administration “has waged a retaliatory campaign against ABC for a single reason: it disapproves of what ABC broadcasts.”
>> “Plaintiffs come to this court reluctantly with no alternative means to eliminate these ongoing and immediate threats other than total capitulation to the administration’s demands.”
>> “The campaign is also calculated to operate in terrorem upon the rest of the industry: ABC is the visible target and suffers the most immediate harm, but the message is addressed to every broadcaster in the country, and the ultimate cost is borne by the press as a whole.”
Disney's lawsuit this morning is one of the stiffest challenges from any media company against the Trump administration. pic.twitter.com/9nVWYQ9U54
— Brian Stelter (@brianstelter) August 18, 2026
Moreover, in citing “some immediate reactions,” Stelter only cited those who also stood with Disney, including his own (Click “expand”):
>> Disney has filed for a temporary restraining order and preliminary injunction, so this legal showdown will move relatively quickly.
>> “ABC’s lawsuit against the FCC has been assigned to U.S. District Judge Loren AliKhan, a Joe Biden appointee,” Scott Nover tweeted.
>> The FCC’s lone Democrat, Anna Gomez, said, “I’m glad Disney has shown courage and stepped up. This should be a welcome sign for every broadcaster who has felt the weight of this overreaching government pressure in silence.”
>> FIRE’s Nico Perrino wrote, “At long last! A broadcast network has found a backbone and is suing to stop the administration’s bullying and censorship.”
>> Right-leaning FCC critics also spoke out. Cato Institute fellow David Inserra: “Today’s lawsuit by ABC Disney against the FCC directly challenges the broad and abusive powers that Congress and prior court decisions gave the FCC.”
Of course, missing from his reporting was any comment or evidence from the Media Research Center, which had been leading the charge for accountability for ABC via the FCC.
“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.”
In addition to Stelter, Mediaite’s One Sheet newsletter didn’t cite a third party critic of ABC News. Even their article about the suit omitted any evidence that had been publically presented of ABC News abusing their privileged access to the nation’s broadcast spectrum.
From the left and the right, the only critical opinions The Washington Post allowed were those against the FCC and Chairman Brendan Carr. They had a quote from Texas Republican Senator Ted Cruz comparing Carr to the gangster movie Goodfellas. They also quoted the Freedom of the Press Foundation’s Seth Stern who called Carr “Trump’s censorship czar.”
The Post did note that some ABC critics had complained they didn’t stand up to Trump well enough in the past: “Some critics said that ABC too easily bowed to Trump. Similar criticism was aired when ABC suspended Kimmel...”
It’s an odd flex that they would cry about supposedly being censored by the government over criticism against the administration, when they were censoring criticism (and evidence) against ABC News.
