• by Adam Buckman , Featured Columnist, Today

Of all the TV news talk shows that the Trump administration could have singled out for equal-time enforcement, “The View” represents a soft target.

ABC assigned “The View” to the news division in 2014, thereby technically categorizing the show as a news program, although no one in their right mind would ever mistake a show as lightweight and idiotic as “The View” for a news show.

Perhaps the company moved “The View” to the news division for the purpose of streamlining costs or some such. 

There is no other apparent crossover between ABC News and “The View,” although the panelists on “The View” all pretend to be political commentators and the show hosts political personalities, with a vast majority of Democrats, for softball interviews.

Before 2014, “The View” came under the purview of ABC Daytime, which is an entertainment unit having nothing to do with news. 

Today, ABC Daytime represents just two shows: “Live With Kelly and Mark” and “General Hospital.” 

 “The View” and “Live With Kelly and Mark” are distinguished from each other in at least two ways: “Live With Kelly and Mark” avoids politics altogether, and by all appearances, President Trump does not watch “Live With Kelly and Mark.”

Whether he watches “The View” or doesn’t watch it, the President seems very aware of what the chatty gals on “The View” are saying about him, virtually all of it unkind.

He seems aware of “The View” in the same way that he keeps up with “Kimmel” and “Colbert,” either by staying up late to watch them, or receiving reports in the morning from a White House staffer assigned to watch all of the shows the President doesn’t like. Where can I apply?

Whatever the case, Trump’s Federal Communications Commission -- led by Chairman Brendan Carr, presumably under Trump’s direction -- says “enforcement proceedings” are underway to bring “The View” into compliance with equal-time rules.

From a legal standpoint, the question is whether or not the rules apply to “The View.” Carr asserts that they do.

But Carr and Trump are also trying to assert that the rules apply to non-news talk shows as well, such as “Kimmel” and “Colbert.” 

Carr revealed last month that the FCC has opened a proceeding concerning “The View.”

“Disney has a program called ‘The View.’ And they’ve been asserting the position that ‘The View’ is what is known as ‘bona fide news’ in the statute,” Carr said last month in an interview with Laura Ingraham on Fox News Channel.

“If you are bona fide news, you don’t have to give candidates equal time,” Carr said. “But Disney and ‘The View’ have not established that that program is, in fact, bona fide news. We’ve started enforcement proceedings taking a look at that.”

A “bona fide” news show is defined by the FCC as “content based on good-faith, independent journalistic judgment rather than partisan purposes.” Taken on its face, this does not seem to describe “The View.”

Is “The View” unfair to Republicans? Some might say yes, but the issue for Trump and the FCC is not what Joy Behar or Whoopi Goldberg say about him.

Rather, it is the parade of guests from the world of politics who are Democrats or Socialists (see photo above of New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani on “The View” in January) with few Republicans.

Maybe a happenstance from early January can provide a pathway to peace on this issue. 

That was when “The View” hosted a firebrand from the right and on the very next day, a firebrand from the left.

Do these two examples -- former Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Georgia) on January 6 and Rep. Jasmine Crockett (D-Texas) on January 7 -- fulfill the FCC’s concept of “equal time”?

It would seem so -- two opposing views that were given “equal time” on “The View.”

It also just so happens that both of these two guests reside on the loony fringe of each of their parties. How more “equal” can you get?