Religious broadcasters ruled free from demographic reporting

The appeals court ruling is a victory for First Amendment rights, National Religious Broadcasters President Troy A. Miller wrote in a statement Wednesday. A three-judge panel of the 5th Circuit Court of Appeals on Monday unanimously decided that the Federal Communications Commission could not require religious broadcasters to disclose demographic data about their employees. The Christian National Religious Broadcasters group, along with the American Family Association, in May filed a lawsuit against the commission’s mandate. They argued that the FCC lacked the authority to require television and radio stations to publicly report the race, ethnicity, and sex of their employees.

When was the policy introduced? The FCC in February of 2024 said it would begin requiring broadcasters to annually report demographic data about their staff. The commission first introduced employment data reporting in the 1970s, according to the Yale Journal on Regulation, as part of an effort to push equal employment in the media industry. The regulation was suspended in 2002, following legal challenges. The Biden administration reinstated it two decades later.

What reasons did the court give for the ruling? The FCC was tasked with regulating broadcast networks and did not explain how compiling employment data serves its targets, wrote Chief Judge Jennifer Walker Elrod. While the FCC has broad authority to act in the public interest, it cannot use that mandate to expand its authority, she wrote. Elrod cited the 1998 ruling in Lutheran Church-Missouri Synod v. Federal Communications Commission that found broadcasters did not have to enact equal employment opportunities for women and minorities.

How did the FCC respond? The reporting requirement was a transparency measure intended to shed light on the media market, FCC Commissioner Anna M. Gomez wrote Tuesday. However, she said the commission did not have the right to weaponize its authority and said the FCC’s “ideological crusade” was about control rather than fairness. She called media control a dangerous form of speech policing and said it was important to defend the First Amendment. Gomez took office at the FCC in September 2023.

Dig deeper: Read my report about the Trump administration pulling funding for public broadcasters.