The broadcast television unit of The Walt Disney Co. has filed reply comments with the FCC in support of its Petition for Declaratory Ruling classifying daytime roundtable chat show The View as a bona fide news program — shielding it from equal time considerations when interviewing political candidates or elected officials.
In short, the tens of thousands of commenters writing the Commission in support of the petition have every right to be concerned, American Broadcasting Companies attorneys argue. “The First Amendment does not permit the government to sit in an editor’s chair,” they state. “Yet that is the seat the Commission now proposes to take.”
The concerns, shared on July 7 by TechFreedom head Berin Szoka in a petition of its own, focus on the perceived threat that the Commission under Chairman Brendan Carr seeks to establish a regulatory environment in which deciding which broadcast programs qualify as legitimate news results in FCC content policing.
In its view, the comments ABC filed in response to its own petition for rulemaking “arise from an unusual posture.” That’s because ABC “did not come to the Federal Communications Commission asking for anything, Paul Clement of Alexandria, Va. law firm Clement & Duke and Wilkinson Barker Knauer LLP attorney Jennifer Tatel said on behalf of ABC and its KTRK-13 in Houston, the station at the heart of the “PDR.”
Rather, it simply wants the Commission to affirm that — “consistent with decades-old precedent” — The View “continues to qualify for the bona fide news interview exemption under Section 315(a).” Yet, “editorial independence” remains at risk.
Clement and Tatel note, “The principle in the balance is far larger: whether a federal regulator may override a broadcaster’s editorial judgment about whom to interview—a judgment the Constitution commits to broadcasters and their audiences, not to the state.”
That’s not a universal view as it applies to The View, which has been described as an entertainment program that regularly includes political figures as guests and is thus not the same as a Sunday morning public affairs program such as CBS’s Face the Nation or NBC’s Meet the Press. This view has been mainly shared by conservative activists including Daniel Suhr of the Center for American Rights (CAR).
Clement and Tatel sit on the opposite side of the spectrum. It is their contention that The View program “remains regularly scheduled, remains under ABC’s control, and remains driven by the same lodestar—newsworthiness—that has long led it to interview the day’s most consequential figures, from Presidents and Senators to Supreme Court Justices.”
For the attorneys, “What has changed is not the program but the political climate around it. The Commission has trained its attention on daytime and late-night television—programs perceived as unfriendly to the current administration—while leaving untouched the vast landscape of talk radio, where candidates routinely appear without their opponents.”
A WARNING FOR SPOKEN WORD AUDIO BRANDS?
The mention of talk radio programs, first addressed by Szoka from TechFreedom, is a touchy subject for broadcast media.
While The View has received outsized attention and many have assailed the Carr Commission for what they consider unfair targeting of a show regularly sharing liberal viewpoints, Clement and Tatel seek to establish the argument that the dominance of right-wing talk programming from iHeartMedia’s Premiere Networks, Cumulus Media’s Westwood One, Salem Media and other distributors is also ripe for review.
Yet, there is no discussion as to whether the talk show on a News/Talk radio station is bona fide news when names such as Dan Bongino and Mark Levin are tossed around. When judging The View by design, a similar argument would be if The Elvis Duran Show, heard on Contemporary Hit Radio stations, suddenly injected a steady calendar of political interviews in-between its celebrity-linked entertainment fare.
Such discussions are up to Acting Bureau Chief Alex Sanjenis and his team, as they continue to digest all of the arguments tied to The View.
If it were up to lone Democratic FCC Commissioner Anna M. Gómez, there would be no reason to even consider the PDR. Pointing to the commentary that the First Amendment does not permit the government to sit in the editor’s chair, she took to social media platform X to state, “ABC is right on this one. You don’t have to like their coverage to see the danger here. Handing government the power to decide what’s newsworthy and which guests to feature is a threat to press freedom, no matter which party is in charge.”
To review ABC’s Reply Comments in full, please click here.
