coverage

After seven weeks on strike, members of the Writers Guild Staff Union are losing their healthcare.

The staff typically has access to the same plan offered to the Writers Guild members through the Producer-Writers Guild of America Health Plan. Employees represented by the staff union earn coverage on a month-to-month basis if they worked 31 hours per week the previous month. But since the group — which includes over 100 workers across legal, communications and residuals departments — has been on strike, they are no longer eligible.

The staff union wrote on social media that it learned about the coverage loss through an online portal “just hours before this goes into effect.”

“This puts children, spouses and their own employees into a further state of crisis. We are in week seven of our strike. This is just the latest attempt by WGAW to bust our union and break our strike,” the union wrote in the Instagram post.

WGA West confirmed employees who receive health coverage on a month-to-month basis are no longer eligible for it as of April 1. The guild said in a statement that striking employees can elect COBRA continuation coverage if they want to be covered in April and that they “cannot make contributions on behalf of staff employees who did not work in March and have no earnings.”

The work stoppage was first called on Feb. 17, after the staff union alleged that management had no intention to reach an agreement on the pending contract. Negotiations between the WGA and its staff union started last September.

The staff union strike has also coincided with the WGA’s ongoing contract talks with Hollywood’s major film and TV studios. Their members’ current contract is set to expire on May 1. The guild hopes to improve its members’ healthcare plans, increase streaming residuals and expand AI protections. This is the first time the labor group has sat down with the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers, since both WGA and SAG-AFTRA went on a historic strike in 2023.

Last week, the staffers sent a complete collective bargaining agreement to the union’s management, which they said was “designed to bring this strike to a resolution.” Key sticking points in the negotiations include seniority-based layoffs and promotions, as well as the right to strike mid-term in the contract.

WGA wrote in a statement that it has “negotiated a contract with the staff union that offers generous economic improvements and workplace protections that are among the best for any union staff in Los Angeles.”

The Trump administration said Thursday that it has launched investigations into 13 states that require state-regulated health insurance plans to cover abortion.

The inquiries are the latest in a long-running dispute between the political parties on how to interpret a provision, known as the Weldon Amendment, that’s included in federal spending laws each year. It bars states from discriminating against health entities that don’t provide, cover or refer for abortion.

When Democrat Joe Biden was president, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services’ civil rights office said the provision didn’t pertain to employers or other healthcare sponsors. The Trump administration said this year that it does.

The administration says that potentially puts states with abortion coverage requirements in violation of the law, because they may not allow employers or other healthcare issuers to opt out. It said it was sending out letters to gather more information from those states.

The Health and Human Services civil rights office launched the investigations “to address certain states’ alleged disregard of, or confusion about, compliance with the Weldon Amendment,” office Director Paula M. Stannard said in a statement.

“Under the Weldon Amendment, health care entities, such as health insurance issuers and health plans, are protected from state discrimination for not paying for, or providing coverage of, abortion contrary to conscience. Period,” Stannard said.

The states with the coverage requirements are California, Colorado, Delaware, Illinois, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, Minnesota, New Jersey, New York, Oregon, Vermont and Washington. All except Vermont have Democratic governors.

New Jersey Gov. Mikie Sherrill said in a statement Thursday that she’ll defend her state’s policies.

“New Jersey requires health insurance plans to follow all applicable laws, including protecting women’s reproductive freedom. So Donald Trump’s latest ‘investigation’ is nothing but a fishing expedition wasting taxpayers’ money,” she said.

The Weldon Amendment is one of a series of provisions known as conscience laws, which provide legal protections for individuals and healthcare entities that choose to not provide abortions or other types of care because of religious or moral objections.

In the years since it was enacted in 2005, there’s been a “partisan swing” in how broadly or narrowly it is interpreted depending on which party is in office, according to Mary Ziegler, a law professor at UC Davis.

Ziegler said the fact that employers and plan sponsors are not mentioned among healthcare entities in the text of the Weldon Amendment could give Democrats an edge with their interpretation, but the question has yet to be resolved in court.

Elizabeth Sepper, a law professor at the University of Texas at Austin, said the Heritage Foundation’s massive policy proposal known as Project 2025 called for an incoming Trump administration to withhold Medicaid funding for states found to violate the Weldon Amendment.

“What we’re seeing here is the fulfillment of a promise to the religious right,” she said.

President Trump’s first administration in 2020 moved to withhold federal healthcare funding from California over what it interpreted as a Weldon Amendment violation, but the Biden administration entered office the next year and reversed the decision.

Mulvihill and Swenson write for the Associated Press.

Federal Communications Commission Chairman Brendan Carr is using his bully pulpit to push back against coverage of the U.S. military action in Iran that his boss President Trump doesn’t like, marking an extraordinary escalation in his clashes with the media.

On Saturday, Carr posted a message on X suggesting TV stations could lose their government licenses to use the public airwaves if they “don’t operate in the public interest.”

Underneath his statement, Carr shared a social media post from Trump, who complained about the New York Times and Wall Street Journal stories on the five refueling tankers were hit during an Iranian missile strike on the Prince Sultan Air Base in Saudi Arabia.

Carr seized on Trump’s missive to issue a warning to TV outlets, which are frequently threatened by the president when he is angry at their coverage.

It’s the latest attempt by the FCC chair to apply pressure on media companies that irritate Trump with critical coverage of his administration.

Since becoming FCC chairman last year, Carr has repeatedly threatened to use the levers of power he has to punish TV and radio stations when they get in Trump’s crosshairs. His behavior has alarmed free speech advocates.

“Broadcasters that are running hoaxes and news distortions — also known as the fake news — have a chance now to correct course before their license renewals come up,” Carr wrote, without providing evidence to back up his claims. “The law is clear. Broadcasters must operate in the public interest, and they will lose their licenses if they do not.”

Carr’s threats are based on his assertions that said he wants to enforce the FCC’s public interest obligation for broadcasters that use the airwaves. He made similar remarks in the fall, which prompted two major TV station groups to keep ABC’s “Jimmy Kimmel Live!” off the air for a week due to remarks the host made regarding slain right-wing activist Charlie Kirk.

Trump and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth have repeatedly attacked news organizations for any reporting that doesn’t say the war in Iran is anything but a rousing success.

On Friday, Hegseth said took aim at CNN and said “the sooner David Ellison takes over that network the better.”

Ellison, the chief executive of Paramount who, along with his father, has forged strong ties to the White House, will have control over CNN in addition to CBS if the company’s deal to acquire the news outlet’s parent Warner Bros. Discovery is completed.

Carr made the appointment of an ombudsman for CBS News a condition to approve Ellison’s Skydance Partners deal to acquire Paramount last year. Paramount also drew scrutiny over its controversial decision to pay $16 million to settle Trump’s legal salvo against “60 Minutes” over the editing of an interview with his 2024 opponent, then-Vice President Kamala Harris. Most legal analysts viewed the case as frivolous.

The FCC has no jurisdiction over CNN, which is why most of Carr’s barbs are aimed at ABC, CBS and NBC, which air on local TV stations. He once wrote on X, “More Americans trust gas station sushi than the legacy national media.”

Trump said in a social media post Sunday that he was “thrilled” with Carr’s remarks and would support his efforts to go after what he called “Highly Unpatriotic ‘News’ Organizations.”

“They get Billions of Dollars of FREE American Airwaves, and use it to perpetuate LIES, both in News and almost all of their Shows, including the Late Night Morons, who get gigantic Salaries for horrible ratings,” Trump wrote.

Andrew Jay Schwartzman, a Washington-based public interest communications attorney, believes Carr’s conduct and threats violate the 1st Amendment, adding that any serious attempt to revoke licenses would be tied up in legal challenges.

“Even if he started to try to deny a license renewal as quickly as he could, Brendan Carr would be long gone before that case would be over,” Schwartzman said. “The law intentionally sets out a very steep burden for the FCC to deny a license renewal; the process takes many years, during which time the licensee continues to operate normally under ‘continuing operating authority.’”

Carr’s remarks Saturday drew immediate blowback from Democrats and 1st Amendment advocates, noting the FCC’s role does not include policing the free press.

“Once again, this FCC pretends it has the power to control news coverage,” FCC Commissioner Anna Gomez said Monday in a statement. “In reality, the FCC has vanishingly little power over national news networks. It licenses local broadcast stations, not networks, and no licenses are up for renewal until 2028.”

Calif. Gov. Gavin Newsom weighed in as well, posting, “If Trump doesn’t like your coverage of the war, his FCC will pull your broadcast license. That is flagrantly unconstitutional.”

Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wis.), usually a reliable voice of support for the Trump administration, expressed his concerns over Carr’s remarks.

“I’m a big supporter of the 1st Amendment,” Johnson told Fox News on Sunday. “I do not like the heavy hand of government no matter who’s wielding it. I’d rather the federal government stay out of the private sector as much as possible.”

Gomez added that while attempts to pull licenses border on folly, Carr’s threats and attacks on the media can create a chilling effect and erode the public’s confidence in the press.

“Over the past year, this FCC has attacked the media as part of a years-long campaign by this Administration and its allies to discredit factual, independent coverage while blaming the press for growing public distrust,” Gomez said. “Meanwhile, it is the FCC’s own credibility and public trust that are rapidly eroding.”

Trump is not the first president to target TV station licenses in response to negative news coverage. At the height of the Watergate scandal in the 1970s, Richard Nixon’s allies attempted to challenge the TV licenses for three stations owned at the time by the Washington Post.

The effort didn’t get far.

The last Los Angeles outlet to lose its broadcast license was KHJ in 1987, when the station was part of RKO General, a media company owned by the General Tire and Rubber Co. The case was related to corporate malfeasance and not broadcast content on the stations.

The process to revoke the RKO licenses took seven years from the moment the FCC voted in favor of the move.

“Since then, only small mom-and-pop radio stations have been litigated,” Schwartzman said. “The cases nearly always involve lying to the government, felony convictions or failure to pay regulatory fees. In one recent case, a small owner convicted of tax evasion still kept his license.”

There would be other logistical hurdles to the FCC making good on Carr’s threats.

As Gomez noted, Carr’s FCC only has regulatory control over the TV stations that carry the network signals. If stations were drop network programming for any reason, they could violate their affiliation contracts and lose the right to carry NFL football and other content that delivers big ratings and revenue.

Sinclair Broadcast Group wanted Kimmel to apologize to Kirk‘s family and contribute to his organization Turning Point USA before putting the host’s late night show on the air.

That did not happen and “Jimmy Kimmel Live!” returned to Sinclair’s stations anyway.

The administration of President Donald Trump has warned that news outlets could have their broadcasting licences revoked over critical reporting on the war against Iran, accusing the media of “distortions”.

Federal Communications Commission Chairman Brendan Carr said in a social media post on Saturday that broadcasters must “operate in the public interest”, or else lose their licences.

“Broadcasters that are running hoaxes and news distortions — also known as the fake news — have a chance now to correct course before their license renewals come up,” Carr wrote.

The warning was the latest apparent threat from Carr, who has repeatedly attracted scrutiny for statements that appear to pressure broadcasters to conform with Trump priorities.

Last year, for instance, Carr called on the channel ABC and its distributors to “find ways to change conduct, to take action” on comedian Jimmy Kimmel, whose late-night show had been critical of the president.

“We can do this the easy way or the hard way,” Carr said of Kimmel on a podcast. ABC temporarily suspended Kimmel’s show in the aftermath of those comments.

Carr’s latest statement prompted swift condemnation from politicians and free-speech advocates, who likened his remarks to censorship.

“This is a clear directive to provide positive war coverage or else licenses may not be renewed,” Senator Brian Schatz of Hawaii wrote.

“This is worse than the comedian stuff, and by a lot. The stakes here are much higher. He’s not talking about late night shows, he’s talking about how a war is covered.”

Aaron Terr, the director of public advocacy at the Foundation of Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE), likewise denounced Carr for seeking to silence negative war coverage.

“The First Amendment doesn’t allow the government to censor information about the war it’s waging,” Terr said.

Trump denounces war coverage

Carr’s latest statement came in response to a social media post from Trump, accusing the “fake news media” of reporting that US refuelling planes had been struck in an Iranian attack in Saudi Arabia.

“The base was hit a few days ago, but the planes were not ‘struck’ or ‘destroyed’,” Trump said in a Truth Social post. “Four of the five had virtually no damage, and are already back in service.”

He added that reporting to the contrary was intentionally misleading. “Lowlife ‘Papers’ and Media actually want us to lose the War,” he wrote.

The president and his allies have faced accusations that they use the power of the state to penalise dissent and critical news coverage, raising concerns about press freedom.

Polling shows that the war, launched by the US and Israel on February 28, is largely unpopular in the US.

A recent Quinnipiac poll found that 53 percent of voters oppose the military action against Iran, including 89 percent of Democrats and 60 percent of independent voters.

The war has also been condemned by legal experts as a clear violation of international law, which prohibits unprovoked attacks.

Trump, however, has offered shifting rationales as to why he believes Iran posed an imminent threat to US security.

He has also asserted that the war is proceeding successfully, despite ongoing Iranian attacks on US forces across the region and the shutdown of the Strait of Hormuz, a key trade artery.

“We’ve won. Let me tell you, we’ve won,” he told a rally this week in Kentucky. “In the first hour, it was over.”

His administration, meanwhile, has blamed the news media for turning public opinion against the war.

“Yet some in this crew, in the press, just can’t stop,” Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth said during a briefing on Friday.

A former Fox News host, Hegseth called for “patriotic” reporters to write more optimistic headlines instead. He denounced TV banners that read, for example, “Mideast war intensifies.”

“What should the banner read instead? How about ‘Iran increasingly desperate’? Because they are. They know it, and so do you, if it can be admitted,” Hegseth said.

He criticised the news outlet CNN, in particular, for a report asserting that the Trump administration had underestimated the chances of Iran closing the Strait of Hormuz.

Hegseth quipped that he hoped a prospective deal would soon place CNN under the control of David Ellison, son of close Trump ally and tech executive Larry Ellison.

“The sooner David Ellison takes over that network, the better,” he added.