Digital Liberty Submits Comments on The View’s Bona Fide News Program Controversy

By Blake Reed

Digital Liberty has filed reply comments in the ongoing debate over whether ABC’s daytime talk show The View qualifies as a “bona fide news interview program” under Section 315 of the Communications Act.

In its filing in MB Docket No. 26-124, Digital Liberty made clear that the Commission should not be in the business of making this determination at all.

Whether The View qualifies as a ‘bona fide news’ program is in the final measure irrelevant. The statutory equal opportunities requirement—popularly known as the Equal Time Rule—is a relic of an obsolete era of central planning that Congress should repeal.

The comments stress that the FCC lacks both the competence and the constitutional authority to act as a national media critic. Asking bureaucrats to analyze transcripts, host lineups, and editorial intent to classify programming as “news” versus “entertainment” is an impossible and dangerous task.

To witness the Federal Communications Commission ponder, with the solemnity of an ecclesiastical council, whether a daytime talk show features the requisite journalistic heft to escape federal censorship is to witness the administrative state at its most inane.

Digital Liberty argued that modern programming routinely blends political commentary, celebrity interviews, and pop culture in ways that defy the rigid categories created in 1934. Forcing the FCC to draw these lines inevitably leads to arbitrary decisions and invites regulatory overreach.

Applying statutory definitions from 1934 (or its subsequent amendments) to modern media formats yields absurd line-drawing exercises. Attempting a clean delineation of ‘entertainment’ from ‘news’ in 2026 is an exercise in futility.

The only real solution, Digital Liberty contends, is to remove the government’s leverage over broadcast content entirely through full privatization of the spectrum.

The ultimate remedy to these recurring, intractable disputes is not a more granular administrative definitions matrix, but rather a complete paradigm shift: the full privatization of the broadcast spectrum. By converting temporary, government-conditioned licenses into permanent, privately owned property rights, the market — not swamp bureaus — will efficiently allocate speech and resources.

Under a privatized system, broadcasters would enjoy the same editorial freedom as newspapers or websites. The government would lose its ability to pressure stations through licensing conditions, and the FCC’s role would shrink to its proper technical function of preventing signal interference.

If a broadcaster owns its spectrum outright, the government has no more right to dictate who must be allowed on its airwaves than it does to tell a newspaper which columnists it must print.

Digital Liberty urged the Commission to interpret existing exemptions as broadly as possible in the short term while calling on Congress to repeal the outdated Equal Time Rule once and for all. The airwaves belong to the people, not to government officials acting as editorial gatekeepers. To read Digital Liberty’s full reply comments in MB Docket No. 26-124, click here.