The View’s Sunny Hostin Blames Mike Pence for AIDS Deaths — When He Was a Talk-Radio Host

So I can’t exactly say I’m the target audience for The View, but I saw the below clip that spread around because of the awkward exchange between two panelists — Sunny Hostin and Alyssa Farah Griffin — concerning Mike Pence. During the testy exchange, Hostin made a bizarre claim about Pence’s handling of AIDS that is completely contradicted by simple facts.

The gist was that Hostin went after Griffin, who served as Pence’s press secretary, for saying she needed to hear more from Pence before assessing his candidacy. Rather than let Griffin respond, Hostin went on a long rant about why she hated Pence — and things got so heated that Whoopi Goldberg had to cut to commercial to ease tensions.

At one point in Hostin’s explanation of why she doesn’t like Pence, she said, “The thing about Pence here is that when I lived in Indiana and I went to Notre Dame, he had a terrible approval rating because of the way he treated the AIDS crisis. Awful. A lot of people died because of him.”

My first reaction was, what the heck is she talking about? A simple Google search then revealed that Hostin graduated from Notre Dame in 1994, at which point Pence was a talk-radio host and thus in no position to make AIDS policy. It would be seven years before he was first sworn in to a public office in 2001 and 19 years before he became governor in 2013. When Hostin was in law school in Indiana, Democrat Evan Bayh was the governor.

In the scheme of things, it shouldn’t matter what a daytime-show talker has to say about a presidential candidate. But we hear a lot about misinformation these days, and the show is on ABC, a major network, and viewed by millions of people. Some of those viewers may not be getting their news elsewhere. And yet Hostin is able to make a sensationalist claim created out of whole cloth and get away with it.

For those who want to witness the train wreck, the relevant exchange happens around the 5:30 minute mark: