FCC Pressure on The View Raises – Yet Another – Serious First Amendment Concern

FCC Chair Brendan Carr. PHOTO CREDIT: Internet Education Foundation

​The Federal Communications Commission under Brendan Carr is winning a special place in American history – for mounting the most serious effort to impose government control of Americans’ speech since President John Adams used the Sedition Act to imprison writers for making disrespectful statements about the president and the government.
 
The victim this time is ABC’s The View, of Whoopi Goldberg and Joy Behar fame.
 
We know, we know… You might love it – 2.5 million viewers do. You might be a conservative who finds The View utterly biased. Or you might be a fan of Saturday Night Live and find The View supremely ridiculous. Wherever you land, you should find this latest foray into speech regulation deeply troubling.
 
Carr first rankled many, including principled conservatives, when he tried to use his regulatory authority to force ABC to remove a late-night talk show host. Now he’s using his regulatory authority over broadcast television to open an investigation of Disney-ABC Television and The View for, well, its viewpoint.
 
Carr’s ire was raised when the program invited James Talarico, a Democratic candidate for the U.S. Senate in Texas, on the show in February. For some programs, this could have been a violation of the “equal-time” rule – which originated in the Radio Act of 1927 and requires candidates to get equal access to the airwaves. Recognizing that this requirement was chilling news coverage, Congress added an exemption for news programming in 1959. The View, which has enjoyed such a news exemption for decades, suddenly found this status being questioned by the government and ABC affiliates bombarded with demands by the FCC’s Media Bureau to file their license renewal applications early.
 
Former U.S. Solicitor General Paul Clement, a Republican, is representing Disney-ABC in a petition with the FCC against these actions. He argues that the Commission’s aggressive regulatory approach threatens “critical protected speech” and could chill political coverage ahead of the 2026 elections. The filing states that the FCC’s current posture risks interfering with “editorial discretion” and could force broadcasters to alter political programming out of fear of regulatory retaliation.
 
Clement’s filing notes that the FCC is not going after stations that aired the conservative Mark Levin Show in which that host interviewed Dan Patrick, who is running for re-election as the lieutenant governor of Texas. Nor did it investigate the Glenn Beck Program for its interview of a Republican candidate for Texas attorney general. Why, then, did the FCC only investigate The View over Talarico?
 
For a conservative administration, this selective, let-me-see-your-papers approach to regulatory enforcement is a decidedly unconservative act. The Disney-ABC filing quotes conservative commentator Ben Shapiro:
 
“I do not want the FCC in the business of telling local affiliates that their licenses will be removed if they broadcast material that the FCC deems to be false. Why? Because one day the shoe will be other foot … I know a lot of people on the Right are saying, ‘The shoe will never be on the other foot, and if it is, the Left will just do it anyway.’ But preemptively breaking things because you believe that the Left is going to break the things still makes the things broken – and you can’t unbreak them.”
 
We would like to add just one more point – it is time to toss the equal-time rule entirely. It is a vestige of laws that hark back to the era of flappers and Model-Ts, when broadcast was king. Streaming and cable today make up about 70 percent of television viewing. Media today is multi-dimensional – full of short videos, websites, influencers, social media platforms, streaming shows, and now AI. Worrying about a candidate getting scarce “airtime” in this environment is an increasingly antiquated concern.
 
Worse, it gives government regulators too much room to meddle in speech. Congress should send the equal-time rule to the scrap heap.

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