Viewers overwhelmingly support ‘The View’s’ fight against the FCC. Will that matter?
As ABC’s “The View” faced intensifying allegations of liberal bias from the Trump administration and the looming prospect of federal regulation, the popular daytime talk show made an unusual plea for help.
“‘The View’ has welcomed your favorite guests and covered the issues you care about for nearly 30 years,” the broadcast network, owned by media giant Disney, told viewers during a commercial break last month.
ABC’s direct appeal to its audience called on the show’s fans to contact the government and share their support for a program under threat from the Federal Communications Commission. The broadcast regulator, ABC said, “wants to control who is allowed to appear on the show.”
Tens of thousands of people took the cue. More than 77,000 public comments have been submitted during the commission’s review process — a majority expressing support for ABC’s speech rights.
Yet FCC Chairman Brendan Carr, an ally of President Donald Trump, hasn’t been shy about his belief that “The View” is biased against Republicans and deserves government regulation.
The case carries major ramification not just for “The View,” but for broader Trump administration efforts to control the programming people watch on their television sets — and to shut down content the president doesn’t like.
Now, as the FCC wraps up its review, a central question remains: Can the overwhelming public support for ABC sway the outcome?
In interviews with Straight Arrow, advocates on both sides of the debate came to the same conclusion:
Nope.
Rallying the troops, or astroturfing?
The FCC launched an investigation in February into whether the talk show had violated a 1930s-era “equal time” policy. The rule mandates that broadcast stations provide equal time on federally controlled airwaves to opposing political candidates.
The core legal question centers on whether “The View” is exempt under a carveout for programs deemed “bona fide news” — a designation the FCC granted the show during President George W. Bush’s administration in 2002. ABC maintains that nothing legally material has changed since then, and that the program remains a regularly scheduled show where interviews and other content are driven by newsworthiness.
In a legal filing on Monday, ABC argued that the issue was already settled in 2002 — and that the FCC was playing politics in an attempt to censor the show. The company alleged in its filing that the commission was going against the will of the people.
Carr “has minimized this overwhelming consensus as the product of a ‘misinformation’ campaign orchestrated by ABC,” the company said. “That characterization is not only inaccurate — it understates the depth of the commenters’ commitment to bedrock First Amendment principles.”
Carr made clear he had no plans of backing down. On the social media platform X, he copy-and-pasted the agency’s official response to ABC’s legal filing.
“While ABC insists that ‘The View’ is a ‘bona fide news program’ under the law, ABC should focus on complying with its public interest obligations, rather than misleading the public about them,” Carr wrote.
Neither the FCC nor ABC responded to Straight Arrow’s requests for comment.
To attorney Daniel Suhr, whose Chicago-based Center for American Rights has been a leading proponent of regulating ABC, the network’s on-air campaign invalidates the sudden surge of public support.
“We all recognize the comments were astroturfed,” Suhr told Straight Arrow. “This was not an organic or spontaneous response on the part of interested citizens.”
Suhr argues that the sheer volume of viewer feedback offers no illumination on what is fundamentally a strict statutory question. Furthermore, he contends that “The View” clearly flunks the “good faith” news standard.
“The View” is “hyper-partisan left” with “mixed reliability,” according to an analysis by media bias firm Ad Fontes Media.
“It’s obvious to anybody with eyes that the show has a partisan political agenda,” Suhr told Straight Arrow. He pointed to contrasting segments on the program that featured an adversarial interview with Vice President JD Vance and what he characterized as a “softball, lovey-dovey” segment with former Vice President Kamala Harris, the 2024 Democratic presidential nominee.
Americans across the political spectrum are welcome to their opinions about “The View,” Suhr said. But ultimately, he said, the FCC must follow the law. Viewers’ individual opinions of the situation, he said, “really can’t add a lot of value.”
Public comments likely won’t — and shouldn’t — have a real impact on the outcome, he said.
“Congress made a policy decision that these huge companies cannot use their loan of the public airwaves to serve as propaganda machines for one political party,” Suhr said. “In any other instance, we would rightly be concerned about having the government regulate bias — but the airwaves belong to all of the American people.”
A ‘performative spectacle’
First Amendment scholars and civil liberties groups view the FCC’s crackdown with alarm — and collectively flooded the agency with comments warning about broad free speech implications. Some 50 First Amendment scholars wrote in public comments that the inquiry amounted to an “unconstitutional FCC crackdown.”
Among those who filed comments in ABC’s support is First Amendment scholar Clay Calvert, a nonresident senior fellow at the right-leaning American Enterprise Institute. Still, he said the FCC’s request for public feedback was little more than a “performative spectacle.”
Staffers who work for Carr — who has described himself as Trump’s “media pit bull” on his coffee mug — will likely review the public feedback, he said, but “they will not influence Chairman Carr’s decision one way or the other.”
“Today, there really is zero daylight separating President Trump’s views from Chairman Carr’s actions,” Calvert told Straight Arrow. A recent Supreme Court opinion that scales back job protections at independent government agencies means Carr effectively serves at Trump’s pleasure.
“We’re really at a critical moment in time when you have an administration that is really doing everything that it can to squelch views and opinions that may not square with President Trump’s,” Calvert said.
Ultimately, he said, it isn’t the government’s job to regulate bias in news reports. Further, he said, the equal time rule is antiquated in a robust media environment that includes broadcast, cable and online news.
“In order for journalists to play a watchdog role on the government, there has to be some kind of daylight and separation and independence between the two,”Calvert said. “The government should not be telling journalism organizations what is or is not news.”
A ‘chilling effect’ — and a remedy?
How will the FCC investigation conclude? The question “presumes that there will even be a final decision,” said Berin Szóka, president of the libertarian nonprofit TechFreedom.
“In some ways the investigation is the punishment,” Szóka told Straight Arrow. “The whole point is to just create an inquiry to pressure broadcasters in general.”
At ABC, the investigation appears to have already affected guest appearances on “The View,” according to a recent analysis by the news outlet Semafor. Since the FCC launched its inquiry, the outlet found, the program “hasn’t featured a single political candidate running in a competitive midterm race.”
Such a “chilling effect” is the true danger of the investigation, Calvert said.
At the end of the day, the ordeal could wind up in court — and ABC is already gearing up for a legal battle. The network’s legal filing this week was co-signed by Paul Clement, a prominent conservative Supreme Court litigator.
“You don’t hire Paul Clement as your FCC lawyer, you hire Paul Clement as a lawyer for cases that are headed to the courts and, ultimately, potentially the U.S. Supreme Court,” Suhr said. “So I think Disney’s choice of its representatives makes very clear its anticipated trajectory for the case.”
Szóka said ABC may already have a case. The government’s actions, he said, amounts to “jawboning,” when the government uses threats and political pressure to coerce individuals or institutions into taking a preferred action.
“This is the most egregious example of jawboning in American history,” Szóka said. “The purpose is clear: to retaliate against speech the government doesn’t like.”
While the tens of thousands of public comments may ultimately fail to sway the commission, Calvert said the feedback provides a vital purpose.
“One way to look at this is preserving history,” Calvert said. “it’s very important that they’re preserving history here, even if it doesn’t change Chairman Carr’s actions.”
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Ella Rae Greene, Editor In Chief
