Some commenters were exercised that I called Whoopi Goldberg’s exhortation on “The View” for her audience to “block [Trump’s Presidency] every way we can! That’s all. Vote, vote, vote, vote, vote, vote, vote, vote, vote, vote. Don’t wait until November. Start looking now” a pure violation of FCC rules, which it is. Broadcast networks are permitted to use the airwaves only if they hew to the public interest. Editorials are in the public interest when they are labelled as such, and political endorsements are permitted. However, a network, in this case ABC, using the privilege of a government-owned and regulated broadcast channel to call on its audience to block the elected government of the United States is not in the public interest, and no news program with an FCC license has ever crossed that line before.
Now comes Fox News, swinging to the other extreme. Radio host Sid Rosenberg joined “Fox News and Friends” last week and launched into a rant against New York’s Muslim, Hamas-supporting, anti-Israel, communist Mayor Zohran Mamdani, as you can see above. The trigger was the Mayor’s grandstanding about wanting to arrest Israel Prime Minister Netanyahu for war crimes.
Rosenberg was a guest, and as a guest, was not speaking for Fox News, nor was Fox News responsible for his opinions. Nonetheless, “Fox and Friends” co-host Griffin Jenkins felt it was necessary to distance the network from Rosenberg’s opinions and to disavow them directly to the Fox viewers.
“We know there are heated feelings around this war last hour, while discussing the role anti-Israel is playing in the rise of antisemitism, one of our guests labeled New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani, a quote, “terrorist,” Jenkins said. “Now that word carries an extremely serious meaning, it should not be used freely and its important we distinguish between strong political criticism and factual allegations.”
All Fox News needed to say, if it really needed to say anything, was to repeat the hoary disclaimer that the opinions expressed on this program are not necessarily those of Fox News. Who in broadcast news ever distinguishes between strong political criticism and factual allegations? On the other networks, guests, contributors and sometimes hosts routinely call President Trump a racist, a fascist, a pederast, a criminal, a dictator, demented, a murderer and worse. Virtually never does a representative of the program apologize or disavow these extreme accusations, and I only say “virtually” because I can’t monitor all the networks all the time.
Jenkins is right: enabling terrorists, encouraging or rationalizing terrorism doesn’t make someone a literal terrorist. However, he pushed back on that position when Rosenberg stated it. That was all that is necessary. He was engaging in responsible news analysis moderation. The other networks seldom even meet that standard.
Ethics Alarms 
wanted to bring this up since you brought it up again:
Your “Which it is” is doing all the work in your argument but it’s the part you still haven’t supported. For the third exchange now…quote the rule. Not the public interest phrase from Section 309, which is a licensing criterion, but the actual rule that prohibits what she said. Your framework of “editorials permitted when labelled, endorsements permitted, but calls to block not permitted” appears in no statute, regulation, or FCC decision. The labeling requirement you describe resembles the political editorial rule, which was repealed in 2000. Your own preference isn’t a rule.
“Broadcast networks are permitted to use the airwaves only if they hew to the public interest” is wrong twice in one sentence too. Networks don’t hold broadcast licenses at all, individual local stations do, so there is no ABC license to condition. And the public interest standard governs a station’s overall service at renewal time. It is not a content code the FCC applies to individual statements, and in 90 years it has never once been enforced against political speech, because Section 326 of the same act says the commission has NO power of censorship and may not interfere with free speech by radio communication. You cannot read one clause of a statute as granting a power that another clause of the same statute expressly denies. You still have not addressed 326.
And look at the quote you posted. “Block every way we can. Vote, vote, vote. Don’t wait until November.” Block how? By voting in elections. That’s not blocking the elected government of the United States, it is the constitutional mechanism for changing a government, and urging citizens to use it is the most protected speech there is. As for “no news program has ever crossed that line before” Cronkite came out against the Vietnam War on the CBS Evening News in 1968, and broadcast stations editorialized against Nixon and endorsed his opponents. It’s irrelevant but networks have urged opposition to sitting administrations for as long as there have been networks, and the FCC never treated any of it as a violation. Quote the rule or stop saying “which it is.”
also, please consider what your own position actually requires…that it would serve the public interest for the government to strip broadcasters over a host urging people to vote against a party. That is the least public-interest outcome imaginable. It would hand every future administration a weapon to silence unfriendly coverage, and the standard you’re proposing, “speech opposing the sitting government forfeits the airwaves” is the defining feature of state media in countries you would never want America to resemble. A Democratic FCC applying your exact rule could have gone after every broadcaster that urged opposition to Biden. The public interest has been read for 90 years to mean robust, uninhibited political debate precisely so that no administration of either party can do this.
Ninety years of FCC practice…Section 326 resolves that “public interest” cannot mean government policing of political viewpoints…. 326 says: “Nothing in this Act shall be understood or construed to give the Commission the power of censorship over the radio communications or signals transmitted by any radio station, and no regulation or condition shall be promulgated or fixed by the Commission which shall interfere with the right of free speech by means of radio communication.” That’s the same Act the “public interest” phrase comes from and it forbids what you’re suggesting…no condition on a license may interfere with free speech.
you’re just wrong on this. Ask another lawyer who you trust and let me know what they say.
Yup, I “opened the door,” as they say.
Your argument isn’t invalid, Ben, but the fact remains that “in the public interest” is an ongoing requirement of an FCC licensee, and allegations that conduct has breached that requirement is a factual one handled on a case by case basis. I believe that is why CBS settled the “60 Minutes” law suit: discovery would have shown that CBS was no longer operating in the public interest. In cases in DC where a contract except that one of the parties, a lawyer, breached the Rules of Professional Conduct by signing it, whether the contract will be enforced anyway depends on what is in the public interest. The current state of unprofessional conduct in broadcast journalism is unprecedented, so you can’t rely on precedent to claim that the public interest requirement is a dead letter, just as the Equal Time provision was properly invoked when Colbert attempted to put CBS’s thumb on the scale in the Texas Democratic primary. The Ladies of the View are too ignorant to realize they are skating on thing ice. I doubt Disney’s lawyers are. I bet they’ve been told to dial it back.
Good brief. I just disagree.
Just to be sure that I understand. The FCC licenses and regulates over-the-air broadcasts, which are provided by CBS, ABC and NBC. FOX News, CNN, and MS NOW are cable news channels, which means that they are not regulated by the FCC, and therefore have more freedom in their programming than the networks, e.g. they are not subject to public interest requirements and have full editorial freedom so they can legally be as biased as they want. Am I correct here?
I hate it when any TV organization apologizes for opinions of guests in their program; challenging the guest live on television should do the job. Guest columns in news papers can be challenged by the letters to the editor, or another column by another guest. As viewer or reader I consider this much more interesting, as this generates debate.