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Trump’s FCC pressure on “The View” could backfire 46%
By Russell Payne62%
7/10/2026, 10:30:42 AM
BS Summary: This article contains 33 faulty reasoning types, including Appeal to Authority, Confirmation Bias, and Hasty Generalization, with Negativity Bias as the most egregious example at 27.4% saturation with 397 hits. Analysis detected 2,770 faulty-reasoning hits from 1,449 analyzed words, generating a BS Score of 48% and a BS Rank of 46% (11,930 of 21,886 articles). This article is better (less manipulative) than 54.50% of the article peer group.
In President Donald Trump’s second term, his long-simmering war on liberal media has boiled over, with the president’s Federal Communications Commission even threatening broadcast licenses over perceived bias against Republicans.
Although this campaign against programs like “ The View ” and “ The Late Show ” might prove a salve for conservatives’ feelings of aggrievement, it’s built on legally shaky ground, and could come to haunt the vast array of conservative broadcasts across the country.
This week, ABC’s morning talk show, “The View,” has once again been thrust into the spotlight because of the FCC’s ongoing battle with the media, which is based on a little-known policy called the “ equal time rule ,” a 1930s era broadcaster regulation that requires programs to give equivalent time to a candidate’s opponent if they permit a candidate for elected office to appear on their broadcast.
If John F.
Kennedy gets to speak for two minutes, then Richard Nixon gets to speak for two minutes.
The FCC’s investigation into “The View” became publicly known in Feb. 2026, after the program interviewed the now Democratic nominee for Senate in Texas, James Talarico , with the agency alleging that “The View,” as it exists today, would not qualify for what’s known as a “bona fide news exemption” to the equal time rule.
Other programs that enjoy this exemption include “The Howard Stern Show” and “Entertainment Tonight,” for example.
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This exemption to the equal time rule has historically been extended to daytime and late-night television programs.
“The View” itself has broadcast under this exemption since 2002.
Trump’s FCC, under chairman Brendan Carr, has attempted to govern with a far narrower interpretation of this exemption and one that excludes “The View” and potentially many other programs like it.
The issue has evolved into a legal dispute between ABC, owned by Disney, and the FCC, over whether the show qualifies for the exception.
And so far, the public comments on the issue have overwhelmingly supported “The View” in this battle.
However, Catherine Ross, a constitutional law professor at George Washington University, told Salon that the legal ground on which the dispute with “The View” is built is not as solid as it might first appear.
“It should be clear that there are currently no statutes, rules or regulations that require ‘fair and balanced’ news coverage, and therefore no permissible role for the federal government to force media outlets to offer a diversity of viewpoints or provide a platform for responses to speech on important public matters,” Ross said.
“That said, the FCC and the president are leaning heavily on media — especially media critical of the current administration — to do just that, or to refrain from critical speech entirely.”
“It should be clear that there are currently no statutes, rules or regulations that require ‘fair and balanced’ news coverage, and therefore no permissible role for the federal government to force media outlets to offer a diversity of viewpoints or provide a platform for responses to speech on important public matters.”
James Speta, a constitutional law professor at Northwestern University, told Salon that, in his view, there is a strong constitutional argument against the equal time rule generally, given that the rule has been historically protected by the inherent scarcity of broadcast licenses due to the limited frequencies available.
Septa explained that Disney has made a few arguments along these lines before the FCC.
“The first argument is because of these changes the whole equal time rules are unconstitutional, and the second thing that they argue is that even if the equal time rules are constitutional, they’re unconstitutional without an exemption for bona fide news coverage.
And then the third thing they argue is that the way the FCC is going to try to enforce its view of what bona fide news coverage is is unconstitutional, because the FCC is discriminating between viewpoints or discriminating on the basis of content,” Speta said.
“My view is that those are all very good arguments.”
Speta said he believes that these constitutional arguments should be a “slam dunk,” yet was reluctant to predict whether or not courts would smile upon these arguments were this issue to be tried.
His reluctance stems from a divergence between what regular people take as a good argument and what courts take as a strong argument.
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Dan Greenberg, a senior legal fellow at the Cato Institute’s Robert A.
Levy Center for Constitutional Studies, had similar skepticism about how courts might act, citing Turner v.
FCC , a 1990s case that affirmed the constitutionality of regulations derived from the scarcity of broadcast licenses, despite the rise of cable television at that point.
“It seems to me that you can read all of these old decisions as endorsing the proposition that the court has decided that this is really not a very strong argument,” Greenberg said.
“So it seems to me that there is precedent of a kind that says scarcity concerns have and do operate, and are going to continue to operate with respect to broadcast media, even in the era of widespread prevalence of non-broadcast media like cable.”
Attached to the formal actions taken by the FCC are the related issues of informal enforcement actions.
For example, Carr has threatened to revoke the licenses of broadcasters running programming critical of the president’s war against Iran.
“Broadcasters must operate in the public interest, and they will lose their licenses if they do not,” Carr said in a post on X in March.
“And frankly, changing course is in their own business interests since trust in legacy media has now fallen to an all time low of just 9% and are ratings disaster.”
The legal term for indirect censorship that stems from, for example, threatening a broadcast license is “ jawboning ,” and on this point, the law is more clear.
Speta explained that the precedent stems from National Rifle Association v.
Vullo, in which the court held that the government cannot use informal tactics, like thinly-veiled threats of selective enforcement or demands for cooperation, to coerce private actors.
Notably, it has not been adjudicated whether or not the FCC has crossed the line into jawboning.
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It’s also clear that, if these actions by the FCC go forward, it could come back to bite conservative broadcast media, which has been spared from the Trump administration’s attacks on the press.
Wayne Unger, a professor of law at Quinnipiac University, told Salon that “The Trump Administration’s selective enforcement — whether it’s the equal time rule or any other matter — can easily be flipped around onto the Republicans and conservative media should the Democrats win the White House in 2028.”
Unger used the example of Citizens United, a conservative organization that successfully sued in 2008 to overturn the electioneering communications ban established in the McCain-Feingold Act on constitutional grounds.
Their motivation was so that they could advertise their film, “Hillary: The Movie,” a film critical of then Secretary of State Hillary Clinton .
Later, in 2016, the Trump campaign attempted to block the release of “Trump: What’s the Deal” a critical investigation into Trump’s business career.
He failed because of the precedent set by the Citizens United case.
Again in 2024, the Trump campaign unsuccessfully attempted to block “The Apprentice,” a negative biographical depiction of the president.
“Here, you could say that Republican-led litigation came back to haunt the Republicans in future elections,” Unger said.
“The same will be true regarding the Trump Administration’s other efforts, too.
In June, Trump prevailed in Trump v.
Slaughter, which overturned a case that prevented presidents from firing the heads of independent agencies without cause.
Now that a president can freely terminate the heads of independent agencies, I’d expect the Democrats to exercise this new rule once they return to the White House.”
Unger concluded that in the event a future administration attempts to enforce the equal time rule against conservative broadcasters, he expects conservative groups to make similar arguments against the rule on constitutional grounds, all “while decrying the selective enforcement even though the Trump Administration is doing the same.”
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