From ABC license reviews to Comey indictments, Trump’s regulatory war on critics enters new phase

The Trump administration is using the immense muscle of federal power to punish media outlets whose coverage is disparaged as overly negative.

The president has long used harsh rhetorical attacks against such companies as CNN and The New York Times, as well as individual journalists, and filed a flurry of lawsuits against them. He’s even accused the press of “seditious” conduct. I suppose we’ve grown accustomed to that.

But there is a whole new level of escalation that goes beyond intimidation. Trump and his allies are pushing the regulatory levers to force networks to spend enormous time and money to preserve their franchise.

And the biggest target right now is ABC.

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FCC Chairman Brendan Carr, who along with Trump has demanded Jimmy Kimmel’s firing, has launched a review of the local station licenses connected to the Disney-owned company. This legal war will drag on for years and is unlikely to succeed; only one license has ever been pulled, and that was a half-century ago.

Think about it. Why should an ABC-owned station in New York, Chicago or Los Angeles have its license jeopardized because a federal agency dislikes the network’s content?

ABC has produced 11,000 documents in the inquiry so far, which gives you an idea of the scope of the showdown.

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“The commission’s actions threaten to upend decades of settled law and practice and chill critical protected speech, both with respect to ‘The View’ and more broadly,” ABC said in a legal filing.

Yes, “The View,” the all-female talk show founded by Barbara Walters in 1997 and syndicated by ABC. That’s now a bullseye within the larger target.

The show has generally featured one conservative to balance the aggressively liberal Whoopi Goldberg and Joy Behar. But these days the conservative panelists are also strongly anti-Trump.

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The initial filing was based on an ABC station in Houston, KTRK, stemming from a minor dispute with “The View.” And as the New York Times points out, the station’s paperwork was signed by former solicitor general Paul Clement.

At issue is whether the program, which is part of ABC’s news division, should be exempt from equal-time rules.

ABC says it has invited JD Vance, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Lindsey Graham, Josh Hawley, Elon Musk, Kevin McCarthy and Marco Rubio, according to the Hollywood Reporter, but all have refused.

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“The View” was given an exemption as a news show back in 2002.

Disney also notes that the FCC hasn’t gone after conservatives – or liberals – on talk radio. 

We’ve seen these tactics in other realms. The Trump Justice Department last fall brought an indictment against James Comey, which was rejected by a judge. After Trump fired Pam Bondi for not getting results, the department last month brought a second, much narrower indictment against the former FBI chief despised by Trump, based solely on the posting of seashell art that said 86*47. And Comey has to hire lawyers again.

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It so happens that the media, even most conservative legal commentators, are calling the case absurd.

Says National Review’s Andy McCarthy, a former federal prosecutor: 

“Sure, Comey plainly did not intend to threaten bodily harm. More fundamentally, though, even if Comey’s state of mind had been sinister, he’d still be innocent because the seashell array was not an actionable threat…

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“The case must be thrown out pretrial because ‘86 47’ is not a true threat.” 

Look, the administration has done what it can to crack down on the press, such as booting Pentagon reporters out of the building after they refused to submit to advance censorship.

And Trump has previously collected at least $16 million apiece from earlier lawsuits against CBS and ABC.

What’s more, Trump’s friend, Oracle co-founder Larry Ellison and his son David, who bought CBS without government interference, may soon control CNN as well. The expectation is that they would shift the world’s first 24-hour network, whose founder Ted Turner died last week, in a more Trump-friendly direction.

Singling out a network or program for retaliation is itself a form of sheer partisanship.

And using the unchecked levers of government against disliked journalists and programs, down to the Whoopi Goldberg level, is deeply troubling.