It is a show about current events, with several hosts who seem not to know much of anything about current events.
Our latest webathon is about fighting the lies of the Left, and it made me think of The View.
The View’s Joy Behar did not quite explicitly blame the residents of East Palestine, Ohio, for the recent train derailment and toxic chemical spill that forced their evacuation. But she walked right up to the line. For clarity, here is the complete transcript of the exchange:
Alyssa Farah Griffin: I do think this was an unforced error by President Biden. It was 20 days before we had Secretary Buttigieg go down, ten days before he put out a statement acknowledging it. This is Trump country. He won by 40 points. He is a president for all Americans, I believe that, but he has to show it.
[crosstalk]
Joy Behar: I don’t know why they would ever vote for him, for somebody who, by the way, he placed someone with deep ties to the chemical industry in charge of the EPA’s chemical safety office.
[Behar points to the camera.]
Behar: That’s who you voted for, in that district, Donald Trump! Who reduces all safety! He did, for those days!
[More crosstalk]
Behar: They have to move past the photo ops, these people, and say, ‘who’s doing the job here?’
When Behar points to the camera and declares, “That’s who you voted for,” you can hear an uncomfortable murmur run through the studio audience; whatever Behar’s intention, the audience in front of her certainly seemed to interpret her remarks as blaming the victim.
Every few weeks or so, The View breaks into the news cycle because one of the hosts has said something controversial. Perhaps what is most maddening to observers is how often the controversy is driven by a host saying something factually wrong — and not slightly wrong, or an easily understandable off-the-cuff misstatement, but a bonkers misunderstanding of the basic facts about the topic under discussion.
In February 2022, Whoopi Goldberg famously characterized the Holocaust as “not about race” and characterized the Nazis and the Jews as “two white groups of people . . . this is white people doing it to white people, so y’all going to fight amongst yourselves.” She later apologized, but then in a December interview with the London Sunday Times she repeated her assertion that the Holocaust “wasn’t originally” about race.
In April, Behar warned, “the Supreme Court is poised to pass a bill contradicting the New York City State laws” on concealed carry to make it “an open carry state, and an open carry city.” The Court doesn’t pass legislation; what was actually happening was that the Court was hearing a challenge to New York’s law limiting the carrying of guns outside the home. In January, the Supreme Court kept the law in place temporarily, declaring an appeals court needed to hear the arguments first.
In July, Goldberg suggested that President Biden should nominate his wife, Jill Biden, to be surgeon general because “she’s a hell of a doctor. She’s an amazing doctor.” The first lady’s degree from the University of Delaware is in education, not medicine.
In September, Sunny Hostin contended that former South Carolina governor Nikki Haley uses “Nikki” as her first name to be a “chameleon” and hide her Indian heritage. Nikki is Haley’s given middle name, and while many assume it is short for “Nicole,” “Nikki” is also a common Punjabi name, the region in India her parents migrated from. (In a perfect irony, Hostin’s birth name is “Asunción Cummings.”)
Most recently, Goldberg speculated that the classified documents found in the homes and offices of President Biden may have been declassified by Biden while he was vice president. There is no evidence that is the case, and Biden and his lawyers have not made that argument.
The View is a show about current events, hosted by several celebrities who don’t know much about current events, and who adamantly refuse to learn anything new about current events. It is not the strong progressive views of several of the hosts that make the show unwatchable; it is that they often seem to have no idea what they’re talking about, and for some inexplicable reason seem to hate doing any homework on the topics they’re discussing.
We live in a political culture that is in a constant state of alert about the threat of “disinformation,” often in the form of something claimed in a forwarded email from Uncle Leo or Facebook post from Aunt Edna, contending that Joe Biden has agreed to sell the State of Nebraska to the Chinese because they’re going to help Bill Gates with his microchip vaccine conspiracy or something similarly outlandish.
But every weekday afternoon, five celebrities get around a table and often blurt out things that are every bit as mis-informative and dis-informative as anything you’ve ever seen on social media. And in the case of Behar’s comments about East Palestine, The View often showcases a poorly hidden sneering contempt for Americans who vote differently, even when they’ve just had a giant chemical disaster force them from their homes.
It’s a free country, and ABC can broadcast whatever it likes as long as that content doesn’t run afoul of the loose limits of the Federal Communications Commission. But in light of Behar’s latest, it seems fair to ask: What is the point of The View?