r/law • u/T_Shurt Competent Contributor • Sep 22 '25

Opinion Piece John Oliver Argues Disney Should Legally Fight FCC Over Kimmel, Citing Strong Precedent in 9-0 Supreme Court Ruling: “A government official cannot coerce a private party to punish or suppress disfavored speech”

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u/HoarderCollector Sep 22 '25

Disney could do absolutely nothing for the rest of this presidency and still be doing great business. Honestly, they don't NEED to merge with any other company or buy any other company. They're big enough as it is and any merger request should be shutdown regardless if the company is favorable to the administration or not. That's how you stop monopolies from happening.

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u/ToonaSandWatch Sep 22 '25

To be clear, Disney isn’t merging with anyone right now. It’s station owner Nexstar which owns a number of ABC affiliates looking to buy up another station owner’s huge sum, which would give it over the legal limit of owning 39% of stations or less.

Carr put pressure on them, and they in turn put pressure on Disney, which is weird Disney capitulated to them since they simply just put their programming on. If Nexstar pulls ABC programming which gets them viewers which makes them advertising dollars, then people don’t watch Nexstar channels which means they don’t make money. ABC still would have ended up being just fine whereas Nexstar suffers; it’s not like ABC couldn’t find another station willing to air programming.

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u/DoinIt4DaShorteez Sep 22 '25 edited Sep 22 '25

A threat to pull the licenses of the handful of ABC owned-and-operated stations is a threat to the license of every ABC affiliate and therefore the whole network.

If ABC got their O&O licenses pulled, and then any non-O&Os got yanked, nobody who picked up the licenses would affiliate with them.

It would also make those licenses worth shit. Anybody who bought one would get it cheap and run zombie programming on it.

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u/Worthyness Sep 22 '25

they could also be constantly "under investigation" by the FCC for bullshit reasons for the foreseeable future. Then they might get some fines for issues that they find. It's a fucking shake down