Disney and ABC walked into federal court Tuesday and asked a judge to save them from the Trump administration — while simultaneously telling the FCC their left-wing talk show The View deserves the same treatment as Meet the Press.
You can’t have it both ways.
The network’s 45-page lawsuit accuses the FCC of running a “retaliatory campaign” against ABC for airing content the White House dislikes. At the same time, Disney lawyers have spent months arguing that a daytime panel hosted by Joy Behar and Whoopi Goldberg is functionally identical to a Sunday morning news program.
Both stories can’t be true.
The View is a left-wing opinion show where celebrity guests and cultural commentary run through the co-hosts’ strongly held personal views. There’s nothing illegal about that — but calling it neutral journalism is a different matter entirely.
“A program booking political guests at a 95-5 ratio is not a discussion; it is a caucus meeting with better lighting.”
Here’s what happened: In April, FCC Chairman Brendan Carr ordered early license renewal reviews for Disney’s eight ABC-owned stations — years ahead of their normal 2028-2031 schedule. It was the first time in more than 50 years the agency had done that.
The timing followed a dust-up over Jimmy Kimmel saying Melania Trump “had a glow like an expectant widow.” It landed on top of an existing FCC probe into Disney’s DEI practices.
ABC’s lawsuit, filed before U.S. District Judge Loren AliKhan, asks for a temporary restraining order. Commissioner Anna Gomez, the lone Democrat on the FCC, publicly cheered the lawsuit, calling the renewal process a “campaign of censorship and control.”
But buried under the headlines is the real story: the FCC has spent months examining whether The View still qualifies for the “bona fide news interview” exemption to the equal time rule — a provision that forces stations to give rival candidates equal airtime once one candidate appears.
ABC insists the show operates just like network Sunday programs, citing a 2002 FCC letter that’s remained untouched for nearly a quarter century.
The numbers tell a different story.
A NewsBusters count of the show’s full 29th season — September through July — found 87 guests expressing liberal opinions against 5 conservative ones. That’s a 95 percent to 5 percent split.
The prior calendar year was worse: 128 liberal guests to 2 conservatives — better than 98 percent one-sided. One of the two conservative bookings only happened because Marjorie Taylor Greene was feuding with her own party’s leadership that week.
That’s not a rounding error. It’s a programming decision, repeated for years, by a staff that knows exactly what it’s doing.
Meet the Press doesn’t have that problem, because it functions as an actual news interview program rather than a daytime rally with commercial breaks.
And if you’re going to ask a federal judge to treat you as a martyr for independent journalism, you probably shouldn’t also ask a federal agency to treat your panel show as hard news while co-host Ana Navarro tells viewers to “vote Democrat” on air.
“Free speech protects ABC’s right to run an all-left-wing panel every weekday morning. It does not entitle ABC to call that panel a news program when convenient and a protected editorial product when it is not.”
None of this makes the FCC’s conduct defensible. A president musing publicly about pulling a license because its comedians are mean to him is exactly the content-based leverage that should worry every American who still owns a copy of the Constitution.
Government should not weaponize licensing against disfavored speech. But a network dressing up a partisan talk show as neutral journalism to dodge a fairness rule is also misleading the public — just with better lawyers and worse math.
Justice Louis Brandeis had the right prescription more than a century ago: sunlight is the best disinfectant.
Publish the guest logs. Publish the FCC’s actual legal theory for a renewal that wasn’t due for two more years. Let both records speak.
The View was created to showcase women of “different generations, backgrounds, and views.” Somewhere between Barbara Walters and Ana Navarro, the “different views” part fell off entirely.
A program booking political guests at a 95-5 ratio is not a discussion. It’s a caucus meeting with better lighting.
Pick a lane. The rest of us are trying to drive.
