FCC's Brendan Carr picks a fight with The View ...
... and winds up in a battle with Mickey Mouse.
PN is supported by paid subscribers. Become one ⬇️
With so many cartoon villains in the Trump administration, it’s hard for an upstart evildoer to break through the news cycle. Federal Communications Commission Chair Brendan Carr is giving it his all, though. He’s threatening late night hosts! He’s appearing at CPAC! He’s sucking up to Elon Musk!
But his latest campaign to menace the hosts of ABC’s The View and destroy the independence of broadcast media may just make him a household name. Because this time ABC and its parent company Disney are fighting back, exposing Carr's blatant misconduct as he schemes to censor media outlets for refusing to toe the MAGA line.
Kimmel was the warm up act
As the agency’s own website acknowledges, “the First Amendment, as well as Section 326 of the Communications Act, prohibits the Commission from censoring broadcast material and from interfering with freedom of expression in broadcasting.”
But Carr has weaponized the FCC’s immense power over local affiliate stations, which license the finite broadcast spectrum from the government. In the fall, he pressured ABC to cancel Jimmy Kimmel Live! for a supposedly offensive joke about the assassination of Charlie Kirk.
“There’s actions that we can take on licensed broadcasters,” he blustered to right-wing podcaster Benny Johnson. “And frankly, I think that it’s sort of past time that a lot of these licensed broadcasters themselves push back on Comcast and Disney and say, ‘Listen, we are going to preempt. We are not going to run Kimmel anymore until you straighten this out because we, we licensed broadcaster, are running the possibility of fines or license revocation from the FCC if we continue to run content that ends up being a pattern of news distortion.’”
The media monoliths gobbling up local news heard that message loud and clear. Nexstar Media Group, which needed Carr to bless its $6 billion merger with rival Tegna, continued to preempt Kimmel on its ABC affiliates, even days after ABC returned the comedian to his time slot.
But Carr was just getting started.
The only view that matters is Carr’s
In February, the FCC opened an investigation of The View over an interview with Texas Democratic Senate candidate James Talarico.
The basis of this investigation is a deliberate misreading of the Equal Opportunities Requirement, better known as the equal time rule, that requires broadcast licensees to give equal airtime to opposing candidates. ABC is not a licensee, but its affiliates are, and, just as he did with Kimmel, Carr leverages those local stations to control the network.
"When you look at the lineup of guests that have typically been on The View, I think it's an uphill climb for Disney to make the case that they're just a straight news program," Carr scoffed to Fox Business’s Maria Bartiromo. (Irony is dead.)
This grossly deceptive. The equal time rule has an exception for bona fide news programs, and for 40 years, the FCC has treated virtually every talk show as covered by it. Howard Stern, Jerry Springer, and The Tonight Show all made the cut. And so did The View, which was created by legendary journalist Barbara Walters in 1997, won more than 30 Daytime Emmy Awards and the 2024 DuPont-Columbia Award for journalism, and received a declaratory ruling back in 2002 that it constituted a bona fide news program.
But in January, Carr purported to change all that unilaterally. In a public notice, he declared that “a program that is motivated by partisan purposes would not be entitled to an exemption under longstanding FCC precedent,” adding that “the FCC has not been presented with any evidence that the interview portion of any late night or daytime television talk show program on air presently would qualify for the bona fide news exemption.”
Who will determine what counts as “partisan purpose?” Brandon Carr, of course.
And he’s not above manufacturing evidence to support his arbitrary claims.
Leg-breaking the locals
On February 11, the FCC’s Media Bureau contacted KTRK, a Houston-based affiliate owned by ABC, about the Talarico interview. The Bureau demanded to know why the station hadn’t placed the show in its public “political file,” triggering the requirement to offer comparable airtime to his opponents. The station responded the next day that The View has long been covered by the bona fide news exemption, and so no political file was required.
Two weeks later, Carr appeared on Maria Bartiromo’s “real” news show on Fox Business and insisted that other ABC affiliates — that is, those owned by Nexstar, Sinclair, and Tegna — “disagree[d] with Disney that The View is bona fide news.”
Carr neglected to mention that he’d virtually ordered those affiliates to “disagree” with KTRK after the fact, and that no station had placed the show in the political file when it aired.
From ABC’s petition to the FCC:
The Bureau neglected to note, however, that while certain ABC affiliates documented Talarico’s appearance in their online public inspection files, the filings were made more than two weeks after Talarico’s appearance and apparently at the request of the FCC, which reportedly promised to eschew enforcement for the late filing. KTRK Television received no such request and no such offer, despite the Bureau specifically contacting it about the Talarico appearance less than 10 days after it occurred.
In plain English, Carr went to 19 third party-owned ABC affiliates in Texas (KTRK is owned by ABC), warned them that they might be in violation of the equal time rule, offered them amnesty if they’d publicly state that The View isn’t real news, and then pointed to those statements as evidence that ABC had violated the equal time rule.
This was part of an extended harassment campaign of ABC and its affiliates. The FCC spent the latter half of 2025 demanding thousands of pages of documents on ABC’s DEI policies — despite the fact that labor practices are far outside the agency’s remit. On April 28, 2026, the FCC demanded that all of ABC’s local affiliates file their license renewal applications early, supposedly because of ABC’s refusal to cooperate with the DEI inquiry.
And to top it off, the agency’s Media Bureau ordered KTRK to file another Petition for Declaratory Ruling regarding The View’s status as a bona fide news program, effectively creating a pretext to revoke the 2002 declaration that it’s exempt from the equal time rule.
The FCC’s lone remaining Democratic Commissioner Anna Gomez put it succinctly in in a letter to Disney CEOJosh D'Amaro: “What Disney and ABC are facing is not a series of coincidental regulatory actions but a sustained, coordinated campaign of censorship and control, carried out through the weaponization of the FCC’s authority as a federal regulator and aimed at pressuring a free and independent press and all media into submission.”
Mickey gets mad
If there’s a silver lining here, it’s that ABC and its parent company Disney seem ready for the fight.
In 2024, the company settled a bumptious defamation suit over George Stephanopoulos’s on-air claim that trump was an “adjudicated rapist” — in fact, the jury found he had forcibly penetrated E. Jean Carroll, just not with his penis.
This time, they’ve hired former Bush solicitor general Paul Clement to carry their banner. Clement has impeccable conservative credentials, having argued some of the most significant Supreme Court cases this century — and not on the good side! But in Trump’s second term, he began challenging the administration as well. He currently represents Federal Reserve Governor Lisa Cook, the law firms challenging Trump’s executive orders, and federal judges in Maryland sued by the DOJ over their immigration procedures.
Clement came out swinging for ABC, accusing Carr of gross bad faith.
“The Commission’s order to file this Petition for Declaratory Ruling is unprecedented, beyond the Commission’s authority, and counterproductive to the Commission’s stated goal of encouraging free speech and open political discussion,” he wrote. “The Commission’s actions threaten to upend decades of settled law and practice and chill critical protected speech, both with respect to The View and more broadly.”
Clement also pointed out that the equal time rule would almost certainly be struck down by the Supreme Court as a violation of the First Amendment if it were challenged today, when a cacophonous media is no longer constrained by the scarcity of megahertz. And — as he did not have to point out — there’s no lawyer in America better placed to argue that case than Clement himself.
Disney seems to have come to the belated realization that knuckling under to Trump is bad for the company’s bottom line. Allowing Carr to muzzle the ladies of The View would be a mistake akin to handing CBS News over to Bari Weiss. And since Trump is loyal to no one, it would only win them a temporary reprieve.
As Commissioner Gomez said, "You cannot buy this Administration's favor. For the right price, you can only borrow it. And the price always goes up."
That’s it for today
We’ll be back with more tomorrow. If you appreciate today’s PN, please do your part to keep us free by signing up for a paid subscription.
Thanks for reading, and for your support.
So good of the Trump “administration” to create its own “Goon Show”.