ABC’s viewers push back on FCC threat
Good morning. Dr. Anthony Fauci pleading the Fifth at a punishing GOP hearing is the lead story almost everywhere. Check out CNN’s latest here. Now, to the latest on ABC, Front Office Sports, “60 Minutes,” Ari Emanuel, Substack, and more…
Today is the last day for the public to comment on the FCC’s politically motivated challenge to ABC’s local station licenses.
The volume of submissions has been absolutely staggering — and overwhelmingly in support of ABC. The FCC website shows more than 145,000 comments. Other open proceedings have at most a few hundred responses.
In Docket 26-131, the ABC proceeding, thousands of the comments are critical of President Trump. Hundreds also call out FCC chair Brendan Carr by name. A search of the docket for the word “fascist” shows more than 500 results.
But the comments mostly convey love, not loathing — a personal connection to the local stations in danger, a deep appreciation for local news coverage, and a powerful insistence that, yes, the stations do serve the “public interest.”
ABC’s on-air lobbying effort clearly worked. Its campaign for “The View” resulted in almost 80,000 comments to the FCC. Now its campaign for the stations has surpassed that. The docket is full of passionate defenses of local TV, thousands of invocations of “free speech,” and relatively few comments supporting Carr.
But let’s be honest: Carr is determined to move forward with this action against ABC. The president, after all, has been vocal about wanting ABC to be punished. So the most likely next step, expected sometime in August, is a referral for an official hearing.
Disney is equally determined to defend ABC. Disney’s general counsel Horacio Gutierrez is no doubt considering when and where to file a First Amendment lawsuit.
But first, the company will file an official response to the license threat. That should show up on the FCC docket tomorrow…
Trump usually rages against ABC (and NBC) as a whole, asserting the networks should lose their licenses, but as you know, the networks are not licensed; only the local stations are. Most ABC affiliates are owned by other companies. But Disney owns eight ABC stations, and those are the ones being targeted by the FCC, purportedly as part of a probe into Disney’s diversity practices.
Because the licenses are held by local stations, this is truly a community issue. Philadelphians who might not have much love for ABC as a whole do care deeply about 6abc, known to everyone in the city as Action News, for example.
“We in Philadelphia know that 6abc is an especially inappropriate target for accusations of not operating in the public interest,” Jim Friedlich, CEO of the Lenfest Institute for Journalism, wrote in this Philly Inquirer op-ed. “The station is a longtime ratings leader for news programming serving a geographically broad and politically diverse footprint. It has, for decades, produced consumer interest, investigative news, and community-oriented programming that speaks truth to power of all stripes.”
FCC veterans understand the high stakes and unusual circumstances of this license fight. Yesterday, an esteemed collection of ex-FCC officials banded together and wrote that the agency is trying to “censor Disney’s and ABC’s speech and send a chilling message to all broadcasters: carry speech we don’t like at your peril.” They called it “a grave violation of both the Communications Act and the Constitution.”
The Guardian’s Jeremy Barr wrote that the group included “key staffers and commissioners appointed by both Democratic and Republican presidents.”
Perhaps even more notably, 14 conservative and free-market organizations also teamed up on a letter to Carr urging restraint in the ABC case. These organizations are “otherwise supportive of the Trump FCC’s agenda,” Reason’s Joe Lancaster wrote, but they “cautioned against abusing powers that could later be used against conservatives.”
Historically, this license-threatening process has been reserved “for genuinely extraordinary circumstances, such as failures that go to a station’s basic capacity to maintain its operation or malfeasance,” they wrote. “Preserving that high and content-neutral bar is precisely what keeps the commission out of the business of judging speech.”
Carr might claim that he is acting on behalf of the public, but the record indicates otherwise.
Every time you hear a Fox News pundit proclaim that Trump represents half of the country, remember this data point: Only 15% of Americans “strongly approve” of the president, a “record low,” according to CNN’s brand-new poll. Overall, Trump’s approval rating stands at 34%. Fully half of Americans strongly disapprove of Trump, “a high across his terms.”
This data is also intriguing as it relates to MAGA media’s relative strength or weakness: “Within his own party, his approval rating has hit a new low at 78% among Republicans, and just 19% of Republicans say they’re enthusiastic about the rest of his second term, down from 38% last spring,” CNN’s Ariel Edwards-Levy writes. Here’s the rest…
Matt Iseman, best known for hosting “American Ninja Warrior” on NBC, will be the host of the forthcoming daily news program “Front Office Sports Tonight,” FOS is announcing this morning.
“Matt is really smart, really curious, really funny and really likable – 4 traits that make for a really fantastic host,” executive producer Rob Silverstein says. “We are excited to have him in the anchor chair leading viewers through the most important cultural, entertainment and business stories in the sports world each night.”
The half-hour syndicated show is launching September 14…
Unsurprisingly, CBS News is reaching beyond the usual TV news ranks for new “60 Minutes” correspondents. There are no Scott Pelley types, people who have spent decades in legacy TV newsrooms crafting newsmagazine-length stories. Instead, there are recruits from The New York Times, Vice and Substack.
You’ve probably already seen the names, but if not, here’s my story for CNN.com. Ross Douthat’s hiring garnered the most attention yesterday, since he’s leaving his NYT opinion columnist and podcast perch to become a full-time “60” correspondent.
Norah O’Donnell, who has contributed to “60” for more than a decade, will now be a full-fledged correspondent as well. The other three new additions are Gianna Toboni, Trevor Phillips and Sebastian Junger…
Ari Emanuel backed the merger in a fiery WSJ op-ed, blasting the antitrust case as “trash” and arguing that Paramount–WBD could “save Hollywood.” Deadline’s Dade Hayes noted that Emanuel “is not without conflict in the legal battle,” seeing as his TKO Group “became one of the first beneficiaries of Paramount’s new ownership” via the deal for UFC rights.
>> “Larry Ellison and his family would be on the hook for $9.8 billion if Paramount Skydance’s deal to buy Warner Bros. Discovery falls apart,” Christopher Palmeri writes for Bloomberg.
The Hollywood Foreign Press Association sued Jay Penske, Penske Media, the Golden Globe Foundation and its chief executive, Greg Goekner, accusing the quartet of orchestrating the establishment of “monopolistic control over Hollywood trade publications, entertainment awards, and For Your Consideration advertising markets.”
The HFPA is seeking more than $150 million in damages and the “rescission of allegedly unlawful agreements,” among others. The AP’s Andrew Dalton has more on that here…
A spokesperson for the Golden Globes said the suit “continues the absurdity and irrationality that the industry has come to expect from the defunct organization formerly known as the HFPA.”
On X, former THR editor Matt Belloni mused whether Penske-owned outlets would cover the lawsuit filing. Here’s how THR covered the suit…
“Prince Harry and other public figures who lost a privacy lawsuit against the publisher of the Daily Mail are facing an immediate 10-million-pound bill as part of an ‘eye-watering’ demand to cover legal costs of the marathon case,” the FT’s Alistair Gray and Daniel Thomas report. “Associated Newspapers on Wednesday called on a judge to order the celebrity claimants… to make the interim ‘payment on account’ within 14 days of a court order,” the pair reports. The publisher says it incurred £34 million in total costs and is seeking reimbursement under a more punitive method than usual, Gray and Thomas note. Read more on that here (gift link)…
Barry Diller’s People Inc. is “exploring a possible sale of The Daily Beast,” Sara Fischer reports. Conversations about the sale “are serious but not necessarily immediate,” she writes. The potential sale comes as the news site claims it is now profitable following a massive reduction in headcount back in 2024. Daily Beast and People reps did not comment.
The effects of AI-generated answers and changing audience habits are beginning to show up in publishers’ bottom lines. “The latest snapshot of digital publishing revenue” from the UK, the Press Gazette’s Charlotte Tobitt writes, contains “the ‘first tremors in an earthquake’ hitting the news industry.” Here’s that snapshot.
>> Related: The title of the latest Vergecast is quite blunt: “You can’t ignore Google Zero anymore.”
>> Yesterday, Trump “urged the Supreme Court to once again step into his messy legal brawl” with E. Jean Carroll, “appealing an $83.3 million jury verdict for defamation on the grounds that, as president, he is immune from the litigation,” Kara Scannell and John Fritze report. (CNN)
>> HBO Max is rolling out “Shorts” to “allow users to watch trailers, clips and bonus content from their favorite series and films,” per Lucas Manfredi. (TheWrap)
>> eBay and several of the company’s ex-execs agreed to a $56 million settlement with bloggers Ina and David Steiner, who were “subjected to a ‘terror campaign’ in 2019 that was ‘designed to stop their reporting,’” Annie Palmer reports. (CNBC)
Some Substackers “are rejecting the company’s decision to flag AI generated writing on the newsletter publishing platform, with several creators saying the new AI detection features are a ‘witch hunt,’” 404 Media’s Emanuel Maiberg reports.
“Some Substack users who use AI to help them write or edit articles say the new policy unfairly discriminates against them, while other users who don’t use AI in their writing at all are worried that Substack will mistakenly flag their writing as being AI generated and tarnish their reputation,” Maiberg writes.
“The backlash from some Substack users shows that companies can’t just flip a switch if they want to ban or give users the ability to filter out AI content from their feeds,” Maiberg notes. Read more on that here…
Season 52 of “Saturday Night Live” will “premiere on September 26, 2026,” making “this year’s season opener the earliest for SNL since 2012,” LateNighter’s Jed Rosenzweig reports. “The next few weeks could bring news of more cast exits, as SNL contracts typically expire on August 1,” he adds…
This edition of Reliable Sources was edited by Andrew Kirell and produced with Liam Reilly. Email us your feedback and tips here.