FCC asks judge to reject Disney lawsuit over ABC’s licensing

Disney wants a judge to stop the FCC before the FCC has actually done anything. That's the whole ballgame here. The agency's lawyers are making a pretty simple point in their filing: you can't sue someone for a decision they haven't made yet. Disney is suing over the possibility of a licensing headache, not an actual one, and that's a hard case to win no matter how many lawyers ABC throws at it.

We get why Disney is nervous. Nobody likes the idea of a federal agency poking around their broadcast licenses, and there's a long history on both sides of the aisle of regulators using that leverage as a cudgel. If this were a case of the FCC actually moving to yank a license over programming decisions or political coverage, we'd be the first ones raising hell about government overreach into a newsroom's editorial choices.

But that's not what's happening yet. This is a company trying to get a courtroom to preemptively neuter a regulator's oversight function before the regulator has even finished looking at the file. That's not standing up for a free press, that's asking a judge to grant immunity in advance. If Disney thinks the review itself is unlawful once it actually happens, that's a fight for another day, with an actual injury to point to instead of a hypothetical one.

The irony is that ABC and its parent company spent years lecturing everyone else about processes and norms and letting institutions do their jobs. Now that the shoe's on the other foot, they want the courts to skip the process entirely. Judges tend to notice that kind of thing, and they should.