Maria Sbytova/Shutterstock
In 2023, Fox News looked like it was on the ropes. The network had to pay $787 million to settle a defamation case brought by Dominion Voting Systems, which claimed that Fox had slandered the firm by promoting the false theory that its voting machine technology helped deliver an illegitimate victory to former President Joe Biden in the 2020 election. The evidence that came out about Fox deliberately spreading lies served as rocket fuel for a challenge to renew one of its television licenses.
In the fall of 2023, a petition filed by the Media and Democracy Project (MAD) called on the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) to hold evidentiary hearings on whether to renew the TV broadcast license of Fox’s Philadelphia TV-station affiliate, WTXF. The petition’s signatories included ex-Fox executive Preston Padden; Alfred Sikes, former Republican FCC chairman; Democrat Ervin Duggan, former FCC commissioner; and Bill Kristol, editor of The Weekly Standard.
MAD wanted to present to the FCC evidence that the network repeatedly and knowingly lied by suggesting that the 2020 presidential election was stolen, violating the FCC character standard that TV license holders may not repeatedly lie to the public, as well as the requirement that they serve the public interest.
Had MAD’s petition been successful, and the FCC initially ruled in favor of blocking the renewal of WTXF’s license, that victory might have served as a template by which MAD and other groups could attempt to block the renewal of Fox’s twenty-eight other TV licenses.
But a combination of shifting political winds and reticence among FCC members to challenge Fox have worked to undermine MAD’s efforts. Despite the initial setbacks, MAD is determined to press on with its challenge to Fox.
That challenge received a sharp setback in January, when outgoing Democratic FCC Chairwoman Jessica Rosenworcel approved the license renewal of WTXF. Rosenworcel argued that denying the renewal would be a violation of Fox’s First Amendment rights to free speech, lumping it together with three other actions brought by the conservative Center for American Rights (CAR).
CAR brought three complaints against ABC, CBS, and NBC for supposed bias against President Trump. Rosenworcel also tossed those cases on the grounds they violated the First Amendment rights of those three networks.
But since the election of Trump, who has expressed the desire to revoke the licenses of media outlets he feels have treated him unfairly, the political climate has radically changed. Rosenworcel has been replaced as FCC Chair by strong Trump-backer Brendan Carr, who contributed a chapter about the FCC to the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 policy blueprint.
Calls by Trump and others on the right to challenge media license renewals have shifted momentum and placed potential supporters of the MAD petition in an awkward position. Many do not feel comfortable publicly opposing Trump’s threats to punish media outlets by revoking their licenses while simultaneously supporting efforts by MAD to revoke a Fox affiliate’s TV license.
When asked about this by The Progressive, Preston Padden, a former senior executive with the Fox Broadcasting Company from 1990 to 1997 and a prominent spokesperson for the MAD petition, was unequivocal.
“Over the last sixteen months, I made trips to Washington, D.C., to try to get [Democratic lawmakers] to support our petition,” Padden tells The Progressive. “To a person, the Democrats told me they were afraid of setting a precedent that Trump would be able to use.”
Nor did outgoing FCC Chair Rosenworcel escape criticism for her decision to renew WTXF’s license on the grounds that denying it would have violated their First Amendment rights.
“This petition was sitting for 550 days,” says Gigi Sohn, a former FCC lawyer who withdrew her nomination for FCC commissioner in 2023 after months of deadlock and attacks by the telecoms industry. Sohn now serves as Benton Senior Fellow & Public Advocate at The Benton Institute for Broadband & Society, a nonprofit dedicated to establishing high-performance, affordable broadband for all.
“She did not want to decide,” Sohn continues. “The FCC has a duty to license broadcasters in the public interest. Renewal is not supposed to be automatic. The FCC has a duty to review the character and content of a broadcaster’s license.”
The MAD petition cites the Dominion case as well as two others—a Delaware Chancery case in which company shareholders sued owner Rupert Murdoch for mismanagement, and a Nevada suit in which Murdoch’s lack of integrity was highlighted by a judge in an inheritance case—as additional proof that Fox’s top management failed to meet the FCC’s character standards. Brian Hansbury, a co-founder of MAD, tells The Progressive that the organization’s petition “rests on the FCC’s character clause.”
On February 19, MAD announced it was appealing the initial decision by Rosenworcel to the full FCC. While supporters concede the full Commission is unlikely to overturn Rosenworcel’s dismissal, and even though there have been many conservative-leaning judges appointed during Trump’s first term, supporters don’t feel the outcome is necessarily cut and dried.
“The case would be going to the D.C. Court of Appeals, which is split right now between Democrats and Republicans,” says Sohn. “It is a long shot, but sometimes a long shot hits.”
Other supporters were more confident.
“Our case is a slam dunk,” says Padden. “We have a court [in the Dominion case] that got access to a treasure trove of internal Fox emails . . . . Our petition was based on a 120-page judicial decision, backed up by voluminous evidence, that Fox repeatedly and knowingly presented false news.”
But in an ominous development of what might be in store for media outlets, Carr reinstated the three complaints brought by CAR against ABC, CBS, and NBC in January, while letting the decision against MAD and in favor of Fox stand.
CAR is now suing all three networks: Its suit against CBS claims that the network employed biased editing on an interview with former Vice President Kamala Harris, while its suits against ABC and NBC allege anti-Trump bias during the nationally televised presidential debate and an equal time rule violation due to Harris’s appearance on Saturday Night Live, respectively. “When it comes to the Center for American Rights’ challenges, they absolutely do seek to weaponize the licensing of the FCC in a way that is absolutely at odds with the First Amendment,” says Hansbury, who claims that these suits were filed to extort better coverage and money from media outlets seen as hostile to Trump.
“CBS, Paramount have a major merger deal,” he says. “It [legal actions by Trump and the right] is almost akin to [saying], ‘Hey, that’s a nice merger deal—it would be a shame if something happened to it.’ ”
Hansbury is referring to a potentially lucrative proposed merger between CBS parent company Paramount Global and Skydance Media, which will seek approval from an FCC that will soon have a Republican majority. Critics maintain that Paramount is trying to settle Trump’s lawsuit, which is widely viewed as frivolous, against him in order to curry favor and make FCC approval more likely.
As one anonymous CBS correspondent reportedly told CNN, “Trump’s lawsuit was a joke, but if we settle, we become the laughingstock.”
Carr’s conservative agenda goes beyond reinstating the cases brought by CAR. At the end of January, he announced he was opening up an investigation against National Public Radio (NPR) and PBS, with the stated goal of defunding them—a move that is specifically proposed in chapter eight of Project 2025. Carr’s efforts have been celebrated by like-minded Republicans in Congress.
While the shift in climate has complicated MAD’s case against Fox, the network isn’t out of the woods. Last month, an appellate court in New York State gave the green light to a $2.7 billion suit against Fox by Smartmatic, a company that builds and implements electronic voting systems. Smartmatic’s suit includes similar allegations to those made by Dominion, highlighting potentially defamatory claims made on Fox about the 2020 election having supposedly been stolen. Should Fox lose in this case, the outcome could add fuel for more license renewal challenges.
Even if MAD’s petition falls short, Hansbury asserts that the effort has already had a positive impact by raising public awareness and serving as a potential model for other civic groups. But the political momentum for media reform has shifted over the last year, as high-profile efforts by Trump and his rightwing allies to punish media outlets they view as adversarial have undercut the initial momentum of MAD’s efforts to make media conglomerates more accountable to the public.
“The very first duty, when Congress passed the 1934 Communications Act,” states Sohn, “said that the FCC licenses the public airwaves—and they belong to the public; they don’t belong to Fox, they don’t belong to CBS, they don’t belong to Sinclair—in the public interest.”