"We don't tell you what to think. We say, 'This is what I think!' And when we do that, that is how you have the dialogue. It's not personal." Whoopi Goldberg
"Do you need your friends to weigh in before you make a big life decision? Well, a lot of my friends are dead now, so I'd need a séance." Joy Behar
Disney just filed a petition asking the FCC to officially declare ‘The View’ a “bona fide news interview program.” Which, if we’re being honest, is like asking the DMV to classify your toddler’s Power Wheels as an ambulance because you duct-taped a flashlight to the roof.
Here’s the tea: Section 315 of the Communications Act says if a broadcast station gives airtime to one political candidate, it has to offer equal time to the other candidates too. It’s the original fairness doctrine with teeth. The only escape hatch is for legitimate, hard-news interview shows—think ‘Meet the Press’, where a stone-faced moderator asks uncomfortable questions in a voice like gravel sliding down a drain. Disney wants ‘The View’ in that club, sipping that sweet regulatory immunity like it’s a sponsored iced coffee.
Disney points out that the FCC granted this exemption back in 2002. Sure—but back then we were using Razr phones and believing NSYNC was forever. The show has not exactly drifted toward PBS territory in the interim.
Now, don’t get me wrong. I love ‘The View’. I love the Hot Topics, the crosstalk, the dramatic camera zooms when someone says something so outrageous that producers cut to commercial with the urgency of a teacher firing up a Disney movie so the class stops talking. But let’s not pretend this is the successor to ‘Face the Nation’. When a political guest sits down at that table, they aren’t getting the Woodward-and-Bernstein treatment; they’re getting roundtable therapy from five hosts and a studio audience that reacts like they’re at a taping of ‘The Price Is Right’, but for democracy. It’s emotional, it’s theatrical, and it is absolutely entertainment.
After Meghan McCain quit in 2021, enduring what she later described as a toxic and isolating environment, ‘The View’ brought in Alyssa Farah Griffin as her "conservative" replacement. McCain absolutely lit into that choice, publicly calling Farah Griffin "a joke" who is "in no way representative of conservative women." The insult to conservatives here was basically this: ABC took McCain, an actual conservative with a recognizable last name and bona fide Republican pedigree (she only mentioned her father, Senator John McCain, about 47 times per episode), and swapped her out for someone McCain views as a political opportunist who doesn't actually hold conservative principles. It's the political equivalent of replacing your steakhouse with a salad bar and still calling it "the meat place."
Beyond any specific incident, the broader insult to conservatives was the show's structural hostility toward anyone to the right of center. McCain has openly called ‘The View’ a "rigged show" where the conservative is set up as a punching bag. She wasn't being paranoid either—there were literal YouTube compilation videos of her voice getting more strained as the pile-ons continued, BuzzFeed articles celebrating her distress as "white women tears," and a daily dynamic where four hosts would join forces against one. The conservative viewpoint was treated less as a legitimate perspective and more as a quarterly special guest star that everyone waits to eliminate. McCain said her experience became so toxic she needed therapy after leaving. Nothing says "we respect diverse viewpoints" quite like driving your conservative hire to weekly trauma sessions.
And then there was the time Elisabeth Hasselbeck—the show's original conservative sacrificial lamb—tried to quit ‘The View’ live on air in 2013 during a commercial break after Barbara Walters tore into her over the morning-after pill, leaving Hasselbeck sobbing backstage and reportedly shrieking “F--- that!” into a hot mic while ripping off her microphone pack like she was defusing a bomb. She didn’t even make it to the end of the episode before attempting to resign, which is the kind of unhinged workplace drama you’d expect from a Bravo reunion set, not a so called “bona fide news interview program.” Hasselbeck stuck it out for a decade as the lone right-leaning target in the Hot Topics Thunderdome before ABC finally cut her loose in 2013—a departure she later described as leaving her unable to breathe, which frankly tracks for anyone trying to survive ten years of daily ideological cage matches disguised as morning television. If ‘The View’ is journalism, then that backstage meltdown was basically ‘All the President’s Men’ with more eyelash extensions and expletives.
If we’re talking about ‘The View’s’ greatest hits of on-air carnage, you can’t ignore the dynamic duo of Whoopi Goldberg and Rosie O’Donnell—though “dynamic” might be too generous a word for what former co-hosts have described as a workplace environment about as cozy as a tax audit. O’Donnell’s 2007 tenure famously detonated during a split-screen screaming match with Elisabeth Hasselbeck that remains one of daytime television’s most unhinged moments—a shouting spectacle so brutal it looked less like a news program and more like a Bravo reunion where someone had already flipped the table. Rosie later admitted her second stint on the show in 2014 was so miserable that Whoopi actively shut her down on air and made her feel unwelcome, which is quite the flex for a show pretending to nurture open discourse. Meanwhile, Goldberg has logged her own controversies, from her widely condemned comments minimizing the Holocaust to routinely cutting off guests and co-hosts mid-sentence with the weary authority of a substitute teacher who’s already given up. Put them together and you don’t have journalism—you have a daytime demolition derby where conservative co-hosts reportedly function less as panelists and more as crash-test dummies. If Disney wants the FCC to treat this as a ‘PBS Newshour’-style news operation, someone should remind them that Tom Brokaw never had to apologize for saying the Holocaust “wasn’t about race” while a co-host sobbed in a commercial break.
The View is many things—a pressure cooker for conservative co-hosts, a daily exercise in Whoopi Goldberg cutting to commercial like she's personally paying for the airtime, a show where Rosie O'Donnell and Elisabeth Hasselbeck nearly came to blows in a split-screen format that looked like a political WWE match sponsored by estrogen and anxiety medication—but it is certainly not ‘The McLaughlin Group’. You remember ‘The McLaughlin Group’, right? That gloriously nerdy PBS roundtable where five people in identical suits would sit in identical chairs and yell "WRONG!" at each other in 90-second increments, all while John McLaughlin rapped a pen on his desk like he was trying to summon the ghost of William F. Buckley. It was chaotic, sure, but it was respectably chaotic—the kind of chaos you could bring home to your parents. Nobody on ‘The McLaughlin Group’ ever cried in a commercial break, not even Tucker Carlson’s sister Margaret. nobody's father was invoked 200 times a season, and nobody had to write a memoir called “Point of View: A Fresh Look at Work, Faith, and Freedom” to process their trauma. ‘The McLaughlin Group’ ended when everyone was too exhausted to say "WRONG!" anymore; ‘The View’ ends segments when Whoopi decides she's had enough and literally waves her hand at the camera like she's casting a dismissal spell in a Harry Potter movie. If Disney thinks this is journalism, then I'm Eleanor Clift.
So if Disney wants to call this a "bona fide news interview program," someone should ask: since when does serious journalism require a designated victim?
A genuine bona fide news program usually features—you know—journalists. One anchor. A set that looks like a funeral home for democracy. Questions designed to extract facts, not applause breaks. “Bona fide” is Latin for “in good faith,” not “in good ratings.” ‘The View’ gives us celebrity interviews, lifestyle chit-chat, and the occasional debate about whether a hot dog is a sandwich. If that counts as journalism, then I have a medical license from watching ‘Grey’s Anatomy’ for fifteen years.
If the FCC rubber-stamps this, every talk show with a pulse and a political guest will demand the same exemption. What’s next? The ‘Real Housewives’ reunion becomes a policy roundtable because Andy Cohen asks someone about their voting record between martini accusations?
Disney can broadcast all the Hot Topics it wants. But it shouldn’t get to use the journalism cheat code to dodge equal-time rules for candidates. If you agree that ‘The View’ belongs in the pop-culture playbook—not the news exemption—tell the FCC. File a comment on Public Notice DA-26-517 at FCC.gov/ECFS. Let them know: just because it airs before noon doesn’t make it ‘Meet the Press’.
Editorial comments expressed in this column are the sole opinion of the writer
