Suggesting, shockingly, that bullies do not simply vanish back into the ether once you roll over and given them exactly what they want, FCC chair Brendan Carr gave a new interview earlier today suggesting that he might just go ahead and go after The View next. And, like, why not? After all, Carr has had a remarkably efficient week, having gone from lobbing attacks at Jimmy Kimmel Live! on a podcast early on Wednesday to Kimmel getting pulled off the air by ABC in the span of an afternoon. When someone so willingly bends over to lick your boot, he’s gotta be thinking, what’s the sense in stopping them halfway through?
Carr made his new comments about the long-running ABC talk show—noted for sometimes contentious political chat, and a favorite of former President Joe Biden—during an appearance on The Scott Jennings Radio Show on Thursday. And while he didn’t go quite as hard on the chat program as he did on Kimmel, with no veiled threats to ABC affiliates to have the program yanked, Carr still launched a new angle of attack in the Trump administration’s ongoing war on TV people who say mean things about them. Specifically (per THR), Carr began pontificating about the equal opportunity/equal-time rule, the nearly century-old legal standard that forces networks to give equal amounts of time to candidates and messages on both sides of an election. As Carr noted, “bona-fide news programs” are considered exempt from the rule, and long-standing precedent has fallen on the side of talk shows like The View (or late-night talk shows like Kimmel, for that matter) falling under the umbrella of news.
But, Carr said, while “Potentially I would assume you can make the argument that The View is a bona fide news show… I’m not so sure about that, and I think it’s worthwhile to have the FCC look into whether The View and some of the programs that you have still qualify as bona fide news programs and therefore exempt from the equal opportunity regime that Congress has put in place.” If the idea Carr is floating here picked up steam, it would presumably open shows like The View up to brand new avenues of legal attack, since Trump could hypothetically begin arguing that any sign of political leanings by Whoopi Goldberg and her very vocal crew could be seen as political messaging that would then have to be matched with a counter message from the right. The net effect, presumably, would be to silence political discourse on the program, i.e., achieve the same aims Trump and his lawyers have been pursuing so aggressively (and with such depressing spurts of success) since he first started trying to sue the media into quietude during the run-up to the 2024 election. In that context, it’s hard not to note what The View team had to say about the Kimmel situation on Thursday morning’s show: Absolutely nothing.
