The FCC's Assault on ABC and 'The View' Just Got Teeth

FCC Chairman Brendan Carr has been needling ABC and The View practically since the day he was installed. Things got white-hot when he helped pressure ABC into briefly suspending Jimmy Kimmel, a move that detonated into massive bipartisan backlash and ultimately made both Carr and the President look small.

They haven’t forgotten it.

For months, Carr has been threatening to strip The View of its status as a “bona fide news” program — a classification the show has held since its inception in 2002. That label exempts the show from equal-time rules, meaning it can invite political guests on without having to hand equal airtime to those guests’ opponents. Lose it, and every candidate who asks could demand a chair.

The threat is already working. Since Carr launched his investigation last February, The View has all but stopped booking political candidates in competitive races — no one running in a midterm campaign. Equal-time rules don’t apply to politicians who aren’t in contested races, so it hasn’t shut the door on political guests entirely; JD Vance and Cory Booker, for instance, have both appeared. But the chill is unmistakable, and that’s rather the point of a chill: it does its work before anyone issues a ruling.

Now the ruling is coming. Bloomberg reports that the FCC is close to acting, and that it’s likely to rule against The View and, separately, against eight ABC-owned stations — most of them in large markets like New York. That second investigation concerns an entirely different matter: the Administration is threatening to yank the FCC licenses for those eight stations over their DEI practices.

It’s all political, of course. The President doesn’t like ABC, doesn’t like The View, and hasn’t forgiven Disney for refusing to dump Jimmy Kimmel the way CBS dumped Stephen Colbert. Disney would appeal both rulings, and legally speaking, it has a fairly strong case on each: The View has been classified as bona fide news since 2002, and the Commission has done nothing in the twenty-plus years since to disturb that. The case against the Disney-owned stations is even more transparently pretextual — retaliation, plain and simple, because Disney wouldn’t cancel Kimmel.

But that’s not the point. Even if Disney and ABC win at every level, the appeals process would be protracted and expensive — and that’s the point. Bleed Disney. Make it think twice before greenlighting negative coverage of the Administration. It’s pure politics, and pure politics has a way of working. Disney has folded before; it settled once already, and it may well go soft again rather than absorb the President’s wrath. The entire operation is designed to chill the First Amendment rights of ABC and Disney — and because Disney is a corporation whose interests bend, finally, toward profit, it might just do the trick.