Brendan Carr
Chairman
Federal Communications Commission
45 L Street, NE
Washington, DC 20554
Dear Chairman Carr,
In recent months, the American public has witnessed increasingly brazen examples of President Trump abusing his power to attack Americans’ constitutional rights, erode the Rule of Law, and advance his own personal and financial interests at the expense of the public interest. The undersigned organizations represent a broad and diverse group of people in the United States, and we write to express our deep alarm and condemnation of recent Federal Communications Commission actions that are aiding and abetting this pattern of authoritarian conduct.
President Trump’s unconstitutional and un-American attacks on the free press are hardly new. His second term, however, has seen these unseemly rhetorical attacks accompanied by an unprecedented weaponization of the FCC’s regulatory authority against television broadcasters to gain leverage in personal legal matters, extract financial settlement payments, and intimidate their news divisions to silence dissenting views and critical coverage.
The President has repeatedly called for ABC, NBC, and CBS to lose their broadcast licenses in response to what he deems unfair coverage. While the President is entitled to his opinions as a media critic, the First Amendment clearly prohibits government officials from abusing federal power to silence, censor, or intimidate news media organizations. We recognize, just as our Founders did nearly 250 years ago, that a free and open press is Democracy’s last and best defense against tyranny. Your Democratic and Republican predecessors had the courage to defend this fundamental American value, publicly rejecting calls to regulate or punish broadcasters for their perceived political views. You too affirmed this principle in 2021, stating: “A newsroom’s decision about what stories to cover and how to frame them should be beyond the reach of any government official, not targeted by them.”
Yet the Commission appears to have fully abandoned this principle in its review and approval of Skydance Media’s recent acquisition of Paramount Global, including CBS News and Stations. As you know, President Trump – acting in his personal capacity – filed a $10 billion lawsuit against CBS in late October, alleging that routine editing of a 60 Minutes interview with Vice President Kamala Harris amounted to “Election Interference and Fraud.” Trump’s lawsuit was widely panned as “legally groundless,” “frivolous and dangerous,” and “ridiculous junk” by legal experts from across the political spectrum. Yet the Commission withheld its approval of the transaction until CBS capitulated and agreed to pay $16 million. Moreover, the Commission’s eventual approval was conditioned on CBS accepting unprecedented and unconstitutional infringements on its editorial independence, including the hiring of a “bias monitor” to police alleged unfairness toward President Trump and his allies.
With CBS now effectively coerced into self-censorship, we’re troubled by recent Commission actions appearing to aim for similar outcomes at ABC and NBC. In letters sent to the Walt Disney Company (December 21, 2024) and Comcast Corporation (July 29, 2025), you warned of potential FCC intervention in ABC’s and NBC’s relationships with affiliated broadcast stations. Neither letter identified any statutory authority for such intervention. Nor did they offer any economic rationale why corporate broadcast groups, some of which own more than 100 stations apiece and rake in billions of dollars a year, would require or warrant the FCC’s assistance in standard business negotiations.
Absent any valid statutory authority, and in light of President Trump’s repeated attacks on these networks and calls to put them out of business – and your own media appearances cheering on his attacks on “these legacy broadcast media outfits and the New York and Hollywood elites” – these letters read as thinly-veiled shakedown threats: Nice business you’ve got there. It’d be a shame if anything happened to it.
Let us be clear: The FCC has no lawful authority to influence network newsrooms’ editorial decisions. The FCC has no lawful authority to coerce networks’ parent companies to pay millions of dollars to the President (or to a non-profit “library foundation” controlled by one of the President’s sons) as a condition of doing business. These are the actions of lawless authoritarians – not of honorable public servants.
As Chairman of the Federal Communications Commission, your sworn duty is to the Constitution – not to any President. We urge you to speak up, as your predecessors have done and you yourself were once willing to do, in defense of the First Amendment and the Rule of Law. Affirm unequivocally that the FCC will no longer serve as the enforcer in President Trump’s unconstitutional shakedowns of media organizations.
Your oath of office demands nothing less.
Sincerely,
Brenda V. Castillo - President & CEO
National Hispanic Media Coalition
John Yang- President and Executive Director
Asian Americans Advancing Justice | AAJC
Rosario Palacios - Executive Director
Common Cause Georgia
David Bowles - Co-founder
#DignidadLiteraria
Noreen Farrell - Executive Director
Equal Rights Advocates
Kathy Spillar - Executive Director
Feminist Majority Foundation
Jessica J. González - Co-CEO
Free Press
Seth Stern - Director of Advocacy
Freedom of the Press Foundation
Seia Watanabe - Vice President of Public Affairs
Japanese American Citizens League
Julián Castro - CEO
Latino Community Foundation
Fanny Grande - Chairwoman
Latino Excellence Project
Toni Kirkpatrick - Chair
Latinx in Publishing
Dr. Ray Serrano - National Director of Research and Policy
League of United Latin American Citizens (LULAC)
Amy L. Hinojosa - President and CEO
MANA, A National Latina Organization
Steven Renderos - Executive Director
MediaJustice
Derrick Johnson - President and CEO
NAACP
Ebonie Riley - SVP, National Action Network Washington Bureau
National Action Network
Diana Luna - Executive Director
National Association of Latino Independent Producers (NALIP)
Felix Sanchez - Founder & Chair
National Hispanic Foundation for the Arts
Marc H. Morial - President & CEO
National Urban League
Ja'Lia Taylor, Ph.D., MSIS - Director of Policy, Telecommunications, and Technology
NCNW
Joel M. Gonzales - President
Nosotros
Thu Nguyen - Executive Director
OCA-Asian Pacific American Advocates
Christopher Lewis - President and CEO
Public Knowledge
Kiran Gill - Executive Director
Sikh American Legal Defense and Education Fund (SALDEF)
Maya Wiley - President and CEO
The Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights
