A DC Circuit panel has shut down an effort to force the FCC’s hand on its news distortion policy, ruling that the coalition pushing for repeal has other avenues before a court intervention. The decades-old policy stays on the books, and the FCC faces no deadline to act.
Judges Karen LeCraft Henderson, Cornelia T.L. Pillard, and Neomi Rao found that the petitioners “failed to establish that they have no other adequate means to seek relief,” the bar a party must clear before a court will order an agency into action. The ruling ends, for now, a mandamus push that had briefly forced the FCC to the table.
The petition traces back to last November, when a bipartisan coalition of former FCC officials, joined by the Radio Television Digital News Association, Protect Democracy Project, and G Squared, asked the Commission to formally rescind the news distortion policy within 90 days. The FCC let the request sit unanswered, and the coalition took the matter to court.
The DC Circuit initially gave the petitioners some ground on process. On May 21, the panel ordered the FCC to respond within 30 days to the mandamus petition after months of agency silence. The Commission responded by declining to eliminate the policy rather than granting the rescission, and the panel’s latest ruling now closes off the mandamus route entirely.
Because radio stations hold FCC licenses subject to renewal, the news distortion policy sits alongside a station’s broader public interest obligations, giving license holders a regulatory backstop they answer to that cable news, print, and online outlets do not face. For station groups, that distinction, alongside the potential for partisan bias, is part of why the repeal push framed the policy as outdated.
Petitioners hoping for further court review would need to wait for a final, appealable FCC order on the policy, or pursue a different procedural path, rather than compelling action directly through the DC Circuit.
