If Disney is a victim of anything, it's its own hubris. I'd put the Trump administration somewhere at the bottom of its list of victimizers, but I would place it at the top of its "consequences" list.
According to That Park Place, Disney is dragging the Trump administration into a lawsuit over what it claims are attacks on its First Amendment rights:
ABC, Disney, and eight ABC-owned television stations filed suit Tuesday seeking to halt the FCC’s early review of the stations’ broadcast licenses. The company claims the government’s actions violate the First Amendment and pose an “existential threat” to ABC.
The FCC ordered the eight stations to apply for license renewal years ahead of schedule in April. The affected stations operate in New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, Philadelphia, Houston, San Francisco, Fresno, and Durham, North Carolina. Their licenses ordinarily would not have been up for renewal until between 2028 and 2031.
Disney’s 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 you would take Disney's side all by its lonesome, which it would very much like you to do, you would get a picture of a tyrannical government attempting to punish a poor, innocent corporation just doing its duty as an informer of the people, and its only crime is telling the truth and stating the facts.
Watching one episode of The View would cure anyone of that delusion.
It is true that ABC and Trump are bitter enemies, and Trump does attack it regularly and personally, but this relationship wasn't created in a vacuum. ABC has regularly attacked not just the Trump administration, but anyone who posed a threat to their message and agenda. Late-night show host Jimmy Kimmel routinely insulted Trump, including telling a "joke" about Melania being a "widow," suggesting Trump's assassination was right around the corner. The excuse made was that he was referring to their age difference, but that kind of joke was never uttered during the Biden era about a president who was demonstrably less healthy than Trump.
The View is, itself, a massive issue that ABC is continuously having to clean up after. FCC Chairman Brendan Carr wonders if its status as a "bona fide news program" should be revoked, thus forcing ABC to balance the program with something more friendly to right-leaning organizations and people. ABC, in turn, argues that doing so could "chill political speech."
To be clear, this is the same show that accused Trump of "crimes against humanity," and practically cheered on the assassination of a health insurance company's CEO. As my colleague Bonchie said after 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.
Let's do a thought experiment. 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 never happen, yet that is the exact dynamic playing out right now regarding the murder of Thompson.
This trouble ABC is having with the government extends to the FCC's investigation of the company's discriminatory hiring and firing practices, which is something Disney has been accused of doing by its own employees. According to the FCC, Disney has been trying to complicate the investigation through litigation, which doesn't say much about their innocence.
Is it proper government oversight or is it retaliation?
Honestly?
I don't care. Not at this point.
As I've written previously, the press has become exactly as Trump has described them. They are the enemy of the people. 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.
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. 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.
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.
