Twenty-two advocacy groups have written to Disney CEO Josh D’Amaro with an unusual request. They are not just backing the company in its fight with the Federal Communications Commission. They are telling Disney that regulatory filings are not enough, and that it should be saying publicly what it believes is happening to it.
The letter is signed by the American Civil Liberties Union, the National Coalition Against Censorship, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, Public Knowledge and TechFreedom, among others. Its central appeal, as reported by Variety, is that Disney keep defending and exercising its First Amendment rights so everyone else can continue to exercise theirs.
Jenna Leventoff, senior policy counsel at the ACLU, framed it around press freedom as a component of a functioning democracy, and said the groups wanted to remind Disney that in standing up for itself it is standing up for others. That is a pointed ask of a company that has historically preferred to handle Washington quietly.
What Disney Is Actually Facing
The step that escalated things was an FCC order directing Disney’s eight ABC-owned local television stations to file for early license renewal. That mechanism has not been used in more than half a century, and some of the licenses were not otherwise due for renewal for close to five years. The order came one day after the White House publicly called on ABC to fire late night host Jimmy Kimmel over a joke about the first lady.
FCC Chairman Brendan Carr has said the license review grew out of the agency’s existing investigation into Disney and ABC’s diversity, equity and inclusion programs rather than being a response to Kimmel, and has pointed to parallel DEI inquiries at Comcast and a news distortion review at CBS News. Both of those companies have said they will cooperate.
Two other strands are open. The FCC revived a news distortion complaint over ABC’s handling of the 2024 presidential debate its journalists moderated, which agency staff had reviewed and dismissed in January 2025. It also opened a proceeding over a Senate candidate’s appearance on The View, testing whether the program qualifies for the equal time rule’s bona fide news exemption.
Disney Has Been Pushing Back
Disney has not been passive. It filed a petition accusing the commission of chilling protected speech, and in the equal time proceeding it told the FCC that “The First Amendment does not permit the government to sit in an editor’s chair.” The National Association of Broadcasters filed along similar lines, and the public comment docket on The View passed 77,000 submissions.
Anna Gomez, the sole Democrat on the three member commission, wrote her own letter to D’Amaro in May describing what she called a “sustained, coordinated campaign of censorship and control” and urging Disney to keep fighting. A group of Senate Democrats separately asked Carr to rescind the early renewal order.
The stakes are attached to assets Disney rarely has to defend in public. The company has spent the past year contesting its interests on other fronts too, including a run of property tax challenges in Florida. Whether it takes the coalition’s advice and argues this one loudly is now its own open question.
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