Dustin Rowles at Pajiba:
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 havenât forgotten it. For months, Carr has been threatening to strip The View of its status as a âbona fide newsâ program â 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 guestsâ 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 â no one running in a midterm campaign. Equal-time rules donât apply to politicians who arenât in contested races, so it hasnât shut the door on political guests entirely; JD Vance and Cory Booker, for instance, have both appeared. But the chill is unmistakable, and thatâs 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 itâs likely to rule against The View and, separately, against eight ABC-owned stations â 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.
The Trump Regimeâs FCC plans an all-out tyrannical assault on ABC by revoking the âbona fide news exemptionâ status from The View and 8 licenses of ABC owned-and-operated stations for âviolationsâ related to DEI policies.
