The View has spent nearly three decades calling itself a lot of things — groundbreaking, important, a cultural institution.
It’s also home to the most Trump Deranged commentary in the liberal media.
And The View made one demand that left Trump stunned into silence.
Disney Demands the FCC Classify The View as a News Program
Disney filed a petition with the FCC on May 7, 2026, on behalf of its television station KTRK-TV in Houston and parent company ABC, asking the agency to formally declare that The View qualifies as a “bona fide news interview program” — the same legal category as NBC’s Meet the Press and CBS’ Face the Nation. The reason matters a great deal. Under Section 315 of the Communications Act of 1934, broadcast stations that give airtime to one legally qualified political candidate must offer equal opportunity to all opposing candidates. News programs are exempt from that requirement. Entertainment programs are not.
So what Disney is really after is the legal right to put one partisan candidate on The View and have zero obligation to give any other candidate the same treatment.
This is a backdoor scheme by Disney to turn the show into a daily one hour informerical for a parade of Democrat candidates in 2026 and 20289.
Carr opened a public comment period on May 22 and posted on X, “Is The View a ‘bona fide news interview program’?” He did not leave the question hanging in the air without context. “Under FCC case law, tv shows do not qualify as ‘bona fide news’ if their decisions are based on partisan purposes, such as an intention to advance or harm an individual’s candidacy,” Carr wrote.
That is a standard The View has a long history of struggling to meet.
The show — co-hosted by Joy Behar, Whoopi Goldberg, Sunny Hostin, Sara Haines, Ana Navarro, and Alyssa Farah Griffin — has drawn years of criticism for its one-sided political commentary and its habit of platforming Democrat candidates while treating Republican figures as targets for ridicule. The most glaring recent example came in October 2024, when then-Vice President Kamala Harris sat down with the panel just weeks before the presidential election. No Republican presidential candidate received comparable treatment.
That appearance set off the chain of events that led directly to this petition.
In February 2026, Carr told reporters the FCC was investigating whether The View had violated federal equal time requirements. The specific trigger was a February 2 appearance by Texas Senate candidate James Talarico on the show — an appearance for which no equal-time paperwork had been filed with KTRK-TV in Houston. The FCC sent a letter of inquiry to the station asking why.
Disney’s response was to go on offense. Its May 7 petition to the FCC claimed the agency’s scrutiny could upend “settled law and practice” and “chill critical protected speech both with respect to ‘The View’ and more broadly.” The filing also pointed to a 2002 letter from an FCC staffer as evidence that The View had been operating under a “bona fide news exemption” for more than 20 years and that the exemption “remains valid.”
But Carr was not buying the argument that a two-decade-old staff letter settles the question. The FCC’s public notice noted that Disney and ABC had also suggested in their petition that the equal opportunities statute itself “would not survive First Amendment scrutiny today” — which is a pretty aggressive legal position for a company that just wants to keep doing what it has been doing.
The equal time rule is rooted in the Communications Act of 1934, which created the FCC and established regulations for broadcast communications. Congress passed the rule specifically to stop media gatekeepers from using the public airwaves to tilt elections. The “bona fide news” exemption was carved out in 1959, when Congress amended the act to cover programs like Meet the Press and Face the Nation — shows built around traditional question-and-answer formats with actual journalists asking the questions.
The View is built around something different entirely.
Carr made the comparison explicit. Disney put The View in the same category as Meet the Press and Face the Nation. Carr pushed back, writing on X: “Disney argues that The View qualifies as ‘bona fide news’ under the law, comparing itself to Meet The Press or Face The Nation. Therefore, Disney argues, it can have one partisan candidate for office on The View while denying equal opportunities to all others.”
And that is the ballgame, right there. If the FCC grants this exemption, The View gets to operate as a political platform with none of the legal obligations that come with being a political platform. It could invite Democrat candidates in election years, shut out their opponents, and claim the whole thing was just journalism.
This petition does not exist in a vacuum. The FCC in April ordered Disney to file early license renewals for all eight of its ABC-owned television stations by May 28, 2026, citing an ongoing investigation into the company’s diversity practices. That order came one day after President Donald Trump and First Lady Melania Trump publicly called on Disney to fire late-night host Jimmy Kimmel over a joke he made about the First Lady. The FCC said the license review was tied to its DEI probe, not to Kimmel’s comments — but the timing was not lost on anyone.
Disney is now fighting on two fronts with the FCC simultaneously. The license review is one battle. The View petition is another. Both involve the same underlying question: whether ABC gets to use public broadcast airwaves as a political instrument without any accountability to the rules that govern everyone else.
The FCC’s public notice on the View petition stated plainly that the agency “has not been presented with any evidence that the interview portion of any late night or daytime television talk show program on air presently would qualify for the bona fide news exemption.” That is not a subtle signal.
Carr has also been consistent on the broader principle. Congress passed the equal time rule to prevent broadcasters from deciding election outcomes, he has said repeatedly. “The law, even when it applies, does not prohibit anyone from having any candidate appear on any show,” Carr wrote. “Rather, Congress intended it to empower voters with more information and encourage more speech.”
But the law also says that if you give one candidate a platform, you give the others the same shot. Disney wants the exemption that lets them skip that part.
The public comment period is now open. Ordinary Americans can submit comments to the FCC on whether The View deserves the same legal status as the Sunday morning programs that have, whatever their flaws, at least maintained the pretense of journalistic standards for decades.
Worth noting: this is not a new fight. The FCC issued new guidance in January 2026 to late-night and daytime hosts that they needed to give political candidates equal time. That guidance rattled the entertainment world. Late-night host Stephen Colbert said CBS executives pulled a planned appearance by Talarico from his program over fears it ran afoul of equal time provisions. Talarico then posted the interview to YouTube, where it racked up more than 7.5 million views and generated $2.5 million in campaign donations within 24 hours — which tells you something about how much political juice these appearances carry.
Disney watched all of that unfold and decided the right move was to petition for an exemption rather than comply with the same rules everyone else is being asked to follow.
The FCC will now decide whether a show where the hosts spent years attacking Donald Trump, cheered Kamala Harris weeks before a presidential election, and regularly book Democrat politicians while treating Republican guests as hostile witnesses qualifies as neutral journalism under federal law.
Don’t hold your breath waiting for the answer Disney is hoping for.
Sources: Breitbart, UPI via Yahoo News, The National Desk, ZeroHedge, OAN, The Hill, PBS NewsHour, CNN, Variety, The Hollywood Reporter, CBS News