Brendan Carr Drops Proof That The View Is Not a 'Bona Fide News Program'
Progressive policy ambitions meet practical realities as Americans weigh costs and consequences.
Brendan Carr didn't invent this problem. "The View" did, every weekday, for years, by turning a daytime talk show into a Democratic campaign stop with a live studio audience clapping on cue. The FCC chairman is just now pointing out the obvious: if you're going to host candidates and treat it like news, you don't get to also claim you're exempt from the rules that apply to news.
New Republican Times Editorial Board
A couple of weeks ago, Townhall reported that the FCC was looking to revoke the "bona fide news program" status of ABC's "The View." That move would revoke the show's equal-time exemption for political candidates and require the program to give equal airtime to both Republicans and Democrats or stop hosting campaigning politicians altogether.
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New Republican Times Editorial Board
Brendan Carr didn't invent this problem. "The View" did, every weekday, for years, by turning a daytime talk show into a Democratic campaign stop with a live studio audience clapping on cue. The FCC chairman is just now pointing out the obvious: if you're going to host candidates and treat it like news, you don't get to also claim you're exempt from the rules that apply to news.
The "bona fide news program" exemption exists for actual journalism, not for a panel of hosts who cut off guests they disagree with and let friendly candidates run unchallenged. Anyone who's watched even ten minutes of that show knows which side gets the softball questions and which side gets the pile-on. That's fine as entertainment. It's not fine as a loophole that lets ABC skip the equal-time requirement Congress built specifically to stop networks from playing favorites during elections.
The predictable howling about "censorship" misses what's actually being proposed here. Nobody's telling "The View" what to say. Carr is saying that if you want the legal protections of a news program, act like one, or lose the label. That's not government overreach, that's holding a network to the standard it claims for itself.
What's actually revealing is how hard ABC and its defenders will fight to keep both things at once: the credibility of "news" and the freedom of pure partisan advocacy, with none of the accountability either one requires.
Commentary written with AI assistance by the New Republican Times Editorial Board.