If Disney can claim victimhood in its latest clash with Washington, it is only as a casualty of its own arrogance rather than of any singular assault from the Trump administration, which belongs far lower on its list of supposed persecutors and far higher on the roster of long-overdue consequences.
According to RedState, the entertainment giant has now hauled the Trump-era Federal Communications Commission into court, alleging that federal regulators have trampled its First Amendment rights in a politically motivated campaign. As reported by RedState, ABC, Disney, and eight ABC-owned television stations filed suit Tuesday seeking to halt the FCCs early review of the stations broadcast licenses. The company claims the governments actions violate the First Amendment and pose an existential threat to ABC.
The FCC in April ordered eight ABC stations to seek license renewals years ahead of schedule, a move Disney portrays as an extraordinary and punitive step. The affected outlets serve some of the nations largest media marketsNew York, Los Angeles, Chicago, Philadelphia, Houston, San Francisco, Fresno, and Durham, North Carolinawhere their licenses would not ordinarily come up for renewal until sometime between 2028 and 2031.
In its complaint, Disney insists that this accelerated timetable is not a neutral regulatory measure but a weaponization of federal power aimed squarely at ABCs editorial choices. Disneys lawsuit argues that the accelerated process is not a legitimate regulatory proceeding but part of a broader effort to punish ABC over programming disliked by President Donald Trump and his administration.
If one were to accept Disneys narrative at face value, the picture would be of a menacing, authoritarian government bearing down on a helpless media company whose only offense is telling the truth and stating the facts. In this telling, ABC is cast as a noble tribune of the people, bravely informing the public while a vengeful White House tries to silence it.
A single episode of The View, however, is enough to shatter that carefully curated image of journalistic martyrdom. The networks daytime flagship has long functioned less as a news forum than as a megaphone for progressive outrage, routinely forcing ABC into damage-control mode.
It is true that ABC and Donald Trump are bitter adversaries, and the president has not hesitated to attack the network personally and repeatedly. Yet this feud did not materialize in a vacuum; ABC has spent years targeting not only the Trump administration but virtually anyone who threatens its preferred narrative and ideological agenda.
Late-night host Jimmy Kimmel, one of ABCs marquee personalities, has made a sport of ridiculing Trump, including a joke about Melania Trump being a widow, a gag that plainly implied the possibility of the presidents assassination. The network later tried to wave it away by claiming he was merely referencing their age difference, but that sort of humor was conspicuously absent during the Biden years, despite Joe Bidens visibly frailer condition.
The View, meanwhile, has become a recurring liability for ABC, prompting questions at the highest levels of federal oversight. FCC Chairman Brendan Carr has openly questioned whether the show should retain its designation as a bona fide news program, a status that spares it from certain fairness requirements and allows it to tilt heavily left without offering meaningful balance.
If that designation were revoked, ABC could be compelled to counterprogram with content more hospitable to conservative voices and right-leaning organizations. The network, unsurprisingly, argues that such a move would chill political speech, as though its current practice of marginalizing dissenting viewpoints were somehow the purest expression of free expression.
This is, after all, the same program that accused Trump of crimes against humanity and all but applauded the idea of a health insurance executive being assassinated. As RedStates Bonchie observed in the wake of that episode, ABC News is culpable in all this. The longer it lets The View go on unchecked, the more unhinged it will become. Throwing Alyssa Farrah Griffin on the corner of the table to routinely get run over by the left-wing hosts was never a solution.
A simple thought experiment underscores the double standard at work. Imagine that a Democrat president was assassinated, and conservatives celebrated the killing by citing the abuses and inefficiencies of the federal government. Would ABC News let that kind of thing happen on its airwaves? Would CNN bring on people to use the killing as a jumping-off point to discuss problems at the FBI and Department of Education?
That would happen, yet that is the exact dynamic playing out right now regarding the murder of Thompson. The hypothetical is not far-fetched; it merely inverts the ideological polarity to expose how selectively the media applies its own standards of decency and restraint.
ABCs regulatory headaches do not end with the license-renewal dispute. The FCC is also probing the companys hiring and firing practices for possible discrimination, an allegation that has already surfaced from within Disneys own workforce and now appears to have attracted federal scrutiny.
According to the FCC, Disney has attempted to bog down that investigation through aggressive litigation tactics, a strategy that hardly projects confidence in its own innocence. For a corporation that insists it is the victim of political persecution, its eagerness to obstruct oversight raises more questions than it answers.
So is this proper government oversight, or is it political retaliation dressed up as regulatory housekeeping? At this stage, the distinction is less compelling than Disney and its media allies would have the public believe.
Honestly? I don't care. Not at this point. That sentiment captures a growing mood on the right, where patience with legacy medias partisan activism has long since evaporated.
As I've written previously, the press has become exactly as Trump has described them. They are the enemy of the people. That is a harsh indictment, but one that resonates with millions who watched corporate media cheerlead for Black Lives Matter riots, amplify COVID panic to justify draconian lockdowns, and smear dissenters as bigots or extremists.
I am, of course, a defender of the First Amendment, but it's obvious to everyone that Disney/ABC and a host of other networks have crossed the line from being news organizations into pure, unadulterated, anti-Republican propaganda machines that got far worse after Trump's election. The constitutional protection of speech does not obligate the public to pretend that partisan agitprop is objective journalism, nor does it shield media conglomerates from the political blowback their own conduct invites.
If it is retaliation, then I'm finding it hard to just say it belongs to Trump and his administration. This is retaliation on behalf of America. For many conservatives, Trumps confrontations with the press are less about one mans vendetta and more about a long-suppressed backlash against an elite class that has treated ordinary Americans with open contempt.
The press has destroyed so many lives, be it cheerleading for Black Lives Matter, promoting and scaremongering through the COVID lockdowns, and so much more. Trump's election was, in part, a sort of middle finger toward the establishment elitists that put us into so many of these losing situations. In that light, Disneys current troubles look less like an isolated regulatory dispute and more like a chapter in a broader reckoning between an activist media and the country it has spent years lecturing and misrepresenting.
They created this issue for themselves; it just took one guy with the gumption to do anything about it for them to start feeling the heat for their own decisions. Whether the courts ultimately side with Disney or the FCC, the deeper reality remains: a press corps that abandoned its role as an honest broker now finds itself facing a public and a political movement no longer willing to grant it the benefit of the doubt.
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