A letter sent Monday by FCC Commissioner Anna Gomez to Disney $DIS CEO Josh D'Amaro charged that the Trump administration has subjected the company and its ABC network to what she called a "sustained, coordinated campaign of censorship and control" waged through the federal media regulator.
Gomez, the only Democrat on the three-person FCC panel, published the four-page letter on her X $TWTR account; in it, she accused Republican FCC Chairman Brendan Carr of turning the agency into a tool for silencing independent media. Neither Disney nor Carr responded to requests for comment.
According to Gomez, the pressure campaign took shape after ABC News reached a $15 million agreement in December 2024 to resolve a defamation suit filed by Trump, directing the funds to his presidential library. She quoted directly from her letter to D'Amaro: "That settlement did not buy you peace. It only bought you time," warning that what followed had proven no company could secure the administration's lasting goodwill — the price of borrowing it, she wrote, only ever climbs.
The letter was first reported by The Wall Street Journal.
Among the regulatory moves Gomez catalogued as evidence of the coordinated effort was Carr's decision last month to trigger an early license review for the eight television stations ABC operates — action the FCC took in the immediate wake of White House demands that Kimmel be dismissed after a joke he made referencing Melania Trump. Those licenses had been set to come up for routine renewal in October 2028, according to Reuters, and the agency has gone more than forty years without pulling a broadcaster's license entirely.
Rounding out Gomez's list of FCC actions against Disney were a probe into the company's DEI programs, a separate inquiry into whether "The View" had run afoul of federal equal-time requirements for political candidates, and the reactivation of a complaint over how ABC refereed the 2024 presidential debate between Trump and then-Vice President Kamala Harris.
Last week the company went on offense, submitting a formal petition to the FCC that centered on the "The View" inquiry and argued the administration's conduct amounted to a First Amendment violation with a damaging effect on free expression across the industry.
Appointed to the commission by former President Joe Biden in September 2023, Gomez acknowledged that the investigations will likely fail in court — but she argued that legal vulnerability was not an accident. "The threat is the point," she wrote.
The commissioner said she expected the investigations to continue without resolution. "I suspect there will be no end in sight for that investigation," she wrote, referring to the debate moderation probe.
Beyond Disney, the FCC has opened a DEI inquiry into Comcast $CMCSA, which owns NBC News, and has taken up a so-called news distortion complaint tied to a "60 Minutes" segment featuring Harris that ran ahead of the 2024 election on CBS.