Trish Regan reports FCC Chair Brendan Carr threatens ABC, CBS, and NBC with license revocation over alleged bias in campaign coverage, specifically targeting Whoopi Goldberg's "anti-Trump fest" on The View. Citing a $16 million settlement between Trump's foundation and ABC and claims of excessive streaming fees harming local news, Carr argues the networks' negative portrayal of Trump as a fascist warrants action ignored under Biden. Ultimately, this move suggests a potential collapse for major broadcast giants if the FCC enforces its stance on perceived neutrality violations. [Automatically generated summary]
Transcriber: CohereLabs/cohere-transcribe-03-2026, Qwen/Qwen3-ForcedAligner-0.6B, sat-12l-sm, and large-v3-turbo
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FCC Takes Notice of Complaints00:02:56
You know, if I were ABC News, NBC News, or CBS News, I'd be pretty freaked out right about now because Donald Trump is putting them all on notice.
Whoopi Goldberg, especially.
There's a new head of the FCC, Brendan Carr.
And guess what?
He's moving up all these complaints that Biden had buried about the mainstream media and their bias because guess what?
Nobody trusts these organizations.
Welcome to the program, everyone.
Make sure you subscribe, share, like, hit the bell.
It's really important.
I am Trish Regan and wow.
It's like one thing after another.
We have a lot of news to get to, but Trump's new FCC chair, Brendan Carr, is basically putting back into the program all of those complaints against ABC, NBC, and CBS over the campaign coverage.
A lot of people had a lot of problems with everything that went down.
A lot of organizations had a lot of problems with everything that was going down.
I mean, how many times do we have to hear all that negativity and negativity that wasn't even around policies, right?
Just around character.
Oh, he's basically the second coming of Adolf Hitler effectively.
I mean that's what they told us and we don't have to go through the sound again.
I've played it for you many times but that's part of the problem.
So now the FCC chair is like you know what it's not cool and you guys are networks and guess what we have jurisdiction over these networks so people like Whoopi watch out.
And we're having a conversation yes and we're going to go back to it but before we do I just want to say this is the beauty of people Who have different opinions.
Sometimes it's messy.
Sometimes we're messy.
And I don't know if you noticed that when I came out this morning, I had trouble trying to figure out because there was nothing in the thing.
There's something in the air.
So just know something is chewing on Trump.
You know what's in the air, Wumpy?
Trumpism.
We lost the election.
Wait a minute.
We lost the election.
We're miserable.
Half of this country is miserable.
And let's just tell the truth.
We hate that he won.
We hate it.
And I'm going to say to that machine over there, you stop blaming me.
You do what you're supposed to do.
You bring up the words I need to say.
So what I need to say is we're going to go back to the convo that we were having.
Must we?
All right, go ahead.
Okay, you get that?
So she's in trouble.
This is after the election that aired in late November, early December.
And basically, Joy Behar, Sonny, a lot of them are willing to double down.
But Whoopi Goldberg knows she's in a whole lot of trouble.
Why?
Because she's one of the ones that just couldn't stop spitting every time she said the president's name.
You know, you can't refute anything with him because he just, when I say him, I mean.
He rambles.
Trump.
Trump.
Local Stations Face Bias Accusations00:08:15
He tends to just.
But.
Can I mention one thing?
You get it?
Okay, so Whoopi Goldberg does not like Donald Trump and has said many, things.
The whole show is just a disaster.
It's like an anti-Trump fest.
They even have an audience that applauds whenever they say something anti-Trump.
You catch that.
So there's a theme there.
The only problem is they are broadcast on federally owned airwaves.
And when you get this many complaints as they have been getting, suddenly the FCC, in this case, Donald Trump's FCC, is taking notice of it.
And you know what they can do?
They can revoke.
their license in all of those local stations all across the country because ABC is there on those local stations courtesy effectively of U.S. government owned airwaves.
And so you can't really totally lose the faith and trust of the American people and have extraordinarily biased news that effectively during Joe Biden's tenure became state media, can you?
When the U.S. owns the airwaves?
Remember how many complaints there were over Vice President Kamala Harris, presidential candidate Kamala Harris going on to Saturday Night Live on NBC right before the election to try and give one last hurrah.
Well, you know, there's this other thing in network television called equal time.
And you can't give all the time to Kamala Harris and no time at all to Donald Trump.
Although I think if you look at the numbers, it was something like they did in many cases at these networks, at these network evening news programs, they give enough time to both.
But 99% of the coverage would be.
negative towards Donald Trump, while 99% of the coverage would be positive towards Kamala Harris.
That's what they call equal time.
I guess not.
There's so much bias filled in there.
And all of these complaints were registered and Biden just washed them away.
His SEC said, oh, we don't care.
We don't care.
It's freedom of the press, whatever.
It's not really.
It's not really because they were just doing what Biden wanted them to do.
And so now Brennan Carr saying, okay, I'm going to revive all this stuff.
I'm reviving all this stuff because you got a bunch of nut jobs.
In the media.
I mean, nut jobs like this guy.
She gets sick and tired of me trying to understand other people and being so pragmatic and trying to be like, I'm okay, you're okay now.
Where can we meet in the middle?
La, la, la.
On this question, we're past that.
You can't meet if they, listen, if they voted for Trump in 16, whatever.
They voted for Trump in 20, they knew exactly what they were doing.
If they vote for Donald Trump in 2024, And I've said it on my show, I'll say it here they're knowingly voting for a fascist.
They're voting for a racist.
They're voting for somebody that wants to put this country 200 years in the back.
And so I'm not trying to figure them out, I'm trying to figure out how we get people out who love democracy, who love freedom, who love the rights of all Americans.
how to get them to the voting booth, because that's how we save our country.
Of course.
Yeah.
I don't know, Joey, how you're going to save your network, your network, which is in a whole lot of trouble.
NBC is in a lot of trouble.
MSNBC is not governed by the exact same set of rules, but their ratings are so bad that they're in enough trouble.
And Comcast just wants to get the ATLL away from them that they're spinning them off.
So there's this thing called Spinco that MSNBC is going to be part of because guess what?
They're losing money and they're hurting the mothership vis-a-vis Comcast shareholders.
They're like, good riddance, good riddance.
We don't want to have anything to do with you.
So MSNBC's in trouble.
CNN's in trouble.
I'm going to get to that in a second because massive layoffs came today.
And ABC, Whoopi Goldberg is in trouble.
Bob Iger even got a letter.
Bob Iger is the CEO of Disney and Disney is the one that owns ABC.
So Bob Iger got a letter even before Brendan Carr went in to run the FCC just a few weeks ago and said, you know what?
There's just been there's been this erosion in public trust.
Wow.
If there's an erosion in public trust, then maybe we shouldn't be revamping or renewing your licenses.
Think about that.
So he's citing all this polling data, and he said ABC's own conduct has certainly contributed to this erosion in public trust.
For instance, ABC News recently agreed to pay $15 million to President Trump's future presidential foundation and museum and an additional $1 million in attorney.
He's to settle a defamation case.
Remember that one?
Because Georgie boy Stephanopoulos was on his political weekend show saying that Donald Trump was something that he was never convicted of.
I'm not even going to say it.
Okay.
Like let's just, it's, it's, it's so gross.
And so yet he knew he wasn't supposed to say that because he knew it wasn't true.
His producers warned him repeatedly.
And yet he said it anyway.
So there's a defamation case and Bob Eichert settled.
So Carr's like, okay, you guys have a problem.
You got a really big problem.
Television station license renewals.
I'll point out they are pro forma licenses are.
are typically rarely contested.
But you know what?
There's a new sheriff in town.
This is a whole new ballgame.
And essentially, typically, they're never denied.
But you can deny them.
The FCC can absolutely deny them.
And Trump has said he would like ABC and other broadcasters to lose their licenses.
So the FCC, which runs this whole thing, basically allowing them to have these ABC licenses, the FCC can take those things away.
And I'm wondering if that's what's going to happen.
Let's go back to the letter.
Carr says in the letter to Bob Iger, the approach that ABC is apparently taking in these negotiations, they're talking about the negotiations with the local stations.
to get the ABC content, which they're charging them through the nose through for.
And Carr's like, why are you charging so much for this junk, this junk on the airwaves?
It concerns me, he said.
My understanding is that ABC is attempting to exact extract onerous financial and operational concessions from local broadcast TV stations under the threat of terminating long-held affiliations, which could result in blackouts and other harms to local consumers of broadcast news and content.
So he's getting after him.
He's taking the side of the stations here and saying, ABC, you are the problem.
And then and he also points out that Disney's only big concern is not those local stations and the quality of their program on the local stations, but rather their streaming business, right?
Because streaming is the only thing that makes money.
Streaming is the future, etc.
So he's saying you guys are focused on streaming at the expense of all these local and freely accessible stations.
And so, quote, the fact that a massive trust divide has emerged between local news outlets and national programmers like ABC, include The View in that.
Only increases the importance of retransmission consent revenues remaining available for local broadcast TV stations to invest in their own local news operations and content that serves their communities.
In other words, they don't need ABC.
He's saying, get rid of ABC.
We don't need this big, cumbersome, lousy network going out there and broadcasting all kinds of you know what to all these local stations, the local stations which the people trust.
Why are you dragging them down and charging them all this money for shows like The View?
It doesn't need to happen.
Shows where Whoopi Goldberg spits when she says the president's name.
I mean, come on.
Whoopi Goldberg, where she accuses Trump of being so anti-gay that he's going to break up families, etc.
I mean, it's bonkers stuff, okay?
like really, really bonkers, conspiratorial, nutjob kind of stuff.