Joy Behar spent 28 years lecturing America about threats to democracy from her daytime throne at ABC.
Now the federal government just knocked on Disney's door – and the paperwork they brought isn't a fan letter.
FCC Chairman Brendan Carr confirmed Friday that his agency has issued formal letters of inquiry to ABC over The View – documents he described as "versions of subpoenas" – and warned that Disney faces an "uphill climb" proving their show qualifies as legitimate news.
The FCC Investigation Disney Walked Right Into
Disney decided to play lawyer.
Rather than quietly comply or stop booking political candidates, ABC's parent company formally asserted to the FCC that The View qualifies as a "bona fide news program" – the legal designation that would exempt the show from equal time requirements.
That argument lit a fuse.
Carr made clear the FCC isn't buying it: "When you look at the lineup of guests that have typically been on The View, I think it's an uphill climb for Disney to make the case that they're just a straight news program."
Disney's own broadcast partners broke ranks. Dozens of ABC affiliates across Texas – stations owned by TEGNA, Sinclair, and Gray Media – quietly filed equal-time notices with the FCC, publicly distancing themselves from Disney's position. ABC affiliates in Abilene, Amarillo, Austin, Dallas-Fort Worth, San Antonio, and more than a dozen other Texas markets all filed. The only Texas ABC affiliate that did not was Houston's KTRK – the one Disney actually owns.
What Brendan Carr's Letters of Inquiry Actually Mean for Disney
The FCC's letters of inquiry aren't optional reading.
They're the formal mechanism by which the agency compels a broadcaster to explain its programming decisions. Failure to respond adequately opens the door to the next stage of enforcement.
This matters because of what Disney needs right now.
Paramount's pending merger with Warner Bros. Discovery requires FCC approval. Every legal filing Disney submits claiming The View is "bona fide news" gets entered into the same regulatory record Carr's team is building. The two tracks – the enforcement action and the merger review – run through the same office.
Trump understood this pressure point years before the media did.
This Is What Accountability Looks Like
The trigger was a February 2nd appearance by Texas Democratic Senate candidate James Talarico – a segment that ran nearly ten minutes on ABC's broadcast airwaves. His primary opponent, Rep. Jasmine Crockett, was not offered comparable time during the campaign period. Disney never filed an equal-time notice with the FCC following that appearance – a silence that, per an FCC source, implicitly signals the network believes The View qualifies as exempt news programming.
Congress wrote the equal time law for exactly this reason.
"They didn't want media gatekeepers deciding the outcomes of elections by having exclusively one political candidate or one political party on all the time," Carr said Friday.
What followed exposed something the legacy media spent two decades pretending wasn't true. When the FCC opened its action against The View, CBS lawyers immediately contacted Stephen Colbert's production team about a scheduled Talarico interview. The interview moved to YouTube – where it drew more than 7.5 million views, dwarfing Colbert's nightly broadcast audience.
Carr called the resulting media coverage a "perfect encapsulation" of why Americans trust the legacy press less than ever: a candidate engineered a fundraising moment, the press ran with a censorship narrative, and CBS and Colbert ended up publicly contradicting each other about who made the call.
Disney has until the FCC process runs its course to prove that a show featuring Whoopi Goldberg, Joy Behar, and Sunny Hostin – hosts who openly campaigned for Kamala Harris – qualifies as journalism.
The letters of inquiry are already in the mail.
Sources:
- Madison Colombo, "FCC Chair Warns 'The View' Faces 'Uphill Climb' in Equal-Time Probe," Fox Business, February 27, 2026.
- Fox News Digital, "Texas-Based ABC Affiliates File Equal Time Notices as FCC Cracks Down on 'The View' Over Talarico Segment," Fox News, February 25, 2026.
- Variety Staff, "Brendan Carr Confirms FCC Has Begun 'Enforcement Proceedings' Against ABC's 'The View' Over Equal Time Issues," Variety, February 19, 2026.
- Reuters, "US Agency Investigating if ABC's 'The View' Violated Equal Time Rules," U.S. News & World Report, February 7, 2026.