FCC Review Forces ABC to Treat Every Punchline as a Venue Dispute

ABC moved Tuesday to protect its broadcast licenses from the dangerous possibility that someone, somewhere, might mistake a joke for content.

Under a temporary networkwide policy called Venue Appropriate Expression, every punchline involving the president, the FCC, a federal agency or a person who has ever appeared on a panel must now be assigned to the jurisdiction most likely to tolerate it. A monologue joke may air in Washington only if it concerns Washington. A joke about Washington that is emotionally based in Los Angeles must be routed through California. A joke with no obvious jurisdiction will be broadcast at 2:43 a.m. from a weather balloon over international waters.

“We are not censoring ourselves,” said a fictional ABC Standards executive, speaking from beneath a stack of maps labeled WHERE DID THE VIBE OCCUR? “We are asking our writers to identify the constitutional home of each thought before expressing it. That is the opposite of fear. It is paperwork with courage inside it.”

The policy follows ABC’s real court fight over an early FCC review of licenses held by eight ABC-owned stations. In the parody version, the network concluded that the safest response was not to change its coverage but to make every sentence so venue-specific that no regulator could tell whether it had been spoken at all.

Tuesday’s broadcast of Good Morning America opened with Robin Roberts welcoming viewers to “the Eastern District of Breakfast,” before a correspondent explained that a story about grocery prices had been moved to a different segment because eggs are sold nationally and therefore possess “multistate emotional standing.”

At The View, producers reportedly installed a small red light over the table that activates whenever a host approaches an opinion. When illuminated, the panel must stop, state its county of origin and agree whether the thought was formed before or after crossing state lines.

“I was about to say something,” one fictional co-host began, “but then Legal asked whether the something had exhausted administrative remedies.”

The biggest problem emerged during rehearsals for late night, where writers discovered that political satire has no stable venue because its injuries occur simultaneously in the audience, on social media, in cable-news greenrooms and inside whichever federal office has recently learned the phrase “public interest.” One joke about a president demanding loyalty from independent regulators was sent to six courts, two consultants and a mediator before being replaced with a bit about a raccoon stealing a wedding ring.

The raccoon bit was then flagged because rings are licensed in certain markets.

Speech, But Make It Procedural

By Wednesday afternoon, ABC’s new system had begun producing the exact editorial chill it was supposedly designed to prevent. A correspondent covering Congress could no longer say a senator “dodged a question” without first determining whether the dodge constituted protected movement, implied criticism or a transportation matter for the Department of Transportation.

Network meteorologists were instructed to stop calling storms “Trump-sized” until lawyers could establish whether wind direction constituted a viewpoint. The word “brutal” was suspended from sports coverage after a producer noted that a 27-point loss could be construed as a punitive regulatory action against the Knicks.

But the network’s compliance team insists the policy is working. It has reduced complaints, mainly because each complaint must now be submitted with a sworn declaration identifying the precise moment the complainant became aware of satire and whether that awareness occurred over the airwaves, online, at brunch or during an ill-advised group chat.

The FCC, in the fictional account, welcomed ABC’s restraint while clarifying that it had no desire to influence content, only to ensure that content understands how easily it could become a licensing matter if it develops the wrong attitude.

That reassurance briefly calmed the network until ABC realized it had been delivered in Washington, which meant it could not legally be discussed on the West Coast until somebody found a judge willing to admit that dread travels interstate.

By evening, the network had located its boldest new form of free expression: a 90-minute special in which every ABC anchor silently points to the county where they are currently afraid to finish a sentence.