Commissioner Gomez on Petition to Repeal News Distortion Policy

On November 13, 2025, a bipartisan group of former Federal Communications Commission officials filed a Petition for Special Relief with the Commission seeking a repeal of the FCC’s news distortion policy and subsequently filed a petition for mandamus with the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia seeking to compel action by the FCC on such petition. In response to the court’s order requiring the Commission to respond to the mandamus petition, on June 22, 2026, the FCC filed its response and included a copy of an unpublished letter dismissing the News Distortion Petition that was signed by the Acting Chief of the Media Bureau on delegated authority. The FCC has increasingly used its regulatory authority as a cudgel against broadcasters whose coverage it dislikes rather than as a neutral enforcement tool, and license renewals and merger approvals have been treated as leverage over editorial judgment rather than as the objective processes the Communications Act requires them to be. This is not an isolated tactic, and the FCC has repeatedly reached for rarely used or long dormant authority to discipline broadcasters it views as critical, including reviving a license renewal mechanism that had not been invoked in over half a century apparently to target a single company's news coverage. This includes repeated reliance on the previously rarely invoked news distortion policy at issue here. That pressure has had a real effect, and station groups and local broadcasters across the country have asked my office what topics are now considered too risky to cover, a question that should never need to be asked in a country with a First Amendment. When a federal agency with the power to grant or revoke broadcast licenses starts weighing in on editorial content, the chilling effect reaches far beyond any single station or story, and it is compounded here by the FCC's choice to resolve this particular petition through an unpublished staff letter rather than a public vote of the full Commission.