Kathy Griffin and FCC Accelerate ABC License Review Over Kimmel
The FCC ordered an early review of ABC's licenses on Tuesday, and kathy griffin readers are now looking at a dispute that could affect eight TV stations tied to Disney. The move came after President Trump called for Jimmy Kimmel's firing, tightening the focus on how the agency's DEI probe is being used.
ABC Stations Under Review
ABC owns eight TV stations, including WABC-TV in New York and KABC-TV in Los Angeles. The expedited review puts those stations on a different regulatory track while the FCC continues its probe into Disney, which began in March 2025 and centers on whether the company's diversity, equity and inclusion policies violated federal anti-discrimination rules.
Brendan Carr said the agency's action was tied to allegations of discrimination and defended the probe into Disney. He also said the FCC had earlier this week ordered another broadcaster, Bridge News, to file early license renewal applications for its TV stations, a sign the commission is prepared to use the same pressure point elsewhere.
Carr's Disney Letter
“You can go all the way back to more than a year ago, in March of last year, where I wrote a letter to Disney saying that there was evidence... or allegations indicating that Disney, through this sort of invidious form of DEI discrimination, was creating, as I specified in a letter to them, racially segregated spaces inside the company,” Carr said at a press conference on Thursday. The FCC also accuses ABC of using race-based hiring practices and of restricting corporate fellowships to selected demographic groups.
Disney said in a statement shared earlier this week that it has a long record of operating in full compliance with FCC rules. The company said it is confident that the record demonstrates its continued qualifications as licensees under the Communications Act and the First Amendment.
Timing Around Kimmel
Katie Fallow said, “This is a way to put pressure on Disney and ABC to achieve different programming and to get them to fire Jimmy Kimmel,” and called the timing “highly suspect.” Blair Levin went further, saying “the timing of the order is strong evidence that the motive for the early renewal process relates to the president's call to fire Kimmel, not an ABC employment action.”
That is the hard part for Disney: the FCC is framing the review as part of a broader discrimination inquiry, but the timing has made it look like leverage over programming. For ABC, the practical issue is less the rhetoric than the licensing calendar now hanging over stations that depend on keeping those broadcast permissions in place.
