Often forgotten as a program under the ABC News umbrella, The View is the highest-rated daytime talk show in America and known for making headlines for the ridiculous things their co-hosts espouse, particularly their strong hatred of former President Trump. But even the second assassination attempt against the former President wasn’t enough to loosen their deep-seated animus, as a new study by the Media Research Center found their coverage was still 100% negative.
The MRC examined the five shows that constituted the week immediately following the second attempt on Trump’s life (September 16 – September 20). The analysis found 36 evaluative statements made by the six co-hosts and all of them were negative.
In addition, they made nine evaluative statements about Trump’s running mate, Ohio Senator J.D. Vance (R) and all of those were negative as well. While there were no mentions of the Democratic vice presidential nominee, Governor Tim Walz (MN), there were nine such statements about Vice President Kamala Harris. All of the statements about her were positive.
Our analysts examined only evaluative statements made by the various hosts, not guests. So while The View did have former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton on September 19’s show, and the cast teed her up to discuss Trump, since she’s not a cast member her comments were not included.
[For more on the methodology, scroll to the end of this article.]
Their staunch dislike for Trump was at least tempered somewhat on September 16, the Monday following the attempted assassination at Trump’s West Palm Beach golf club, as only one negative comment was made.
Alyssa Farah Griffin, the supposed Republican on panel, suggested Trump’s desires to golf put himself in a position ripe for an assassin. “And I think there needs to be a true law enforcement post-mortem of what can better be done, and I know some of this is where he chooses to be, but then he needs to not do that,” she said.
Later in the week, she touted Harris for changing her political positions. “She has moderated on a number of policy issues from supporting the Green New Deal to at one point supporting banning fracking, now being for it,” she said. “I welcome centrism and welcome growing and evolving while you're in office…”
Farah Griffin was in lockstep with the more openly liberal members of the cast despite framing herself as a new voice from the right when they first hired her on. “Barbara Walters had this vision for bringing women from totally different backgrounds, lived experiences, careers, to talk about the tough issues that, frankly, our elected officials often aren't tackling and we do that every day,” she said.
But it didn’t last long. On Tuesday September 17, the cast members erupted in anger as the members of the Trump/Vance ticket called out the rhetoric coming from the left for inciting the would-be shooter. There were 12 negative comments made about Trump and eight against Vance that day.
“I mean, he has been inciting violence since 2016 telling them to beat up hecklers, threaten to shoot looters and migrants,” declared moderator Whoopi Goldberg. “You know, let's stop this both sides stuff because it's not correct! It is not both sides! It is one clear side… This is you got to stop doing what you're doing, J.D.! And what you're doing Mr. T.!”
Goldberg also falsely asserted that Trump was “sending people” to Springfield, OH to threaten the residents.
During September 18’sshow, co-host Sunny Hostin was among the 10 negative comments against Trump that day as she attacked former soccer player Brittany Mahomes over liking a Trump post on Instagram.
“It just seems to me that since she is in an interracial marriage, she should have known that to support a racist is problematic,” she said. “Her children are biracial and her family is one of the families that in the '70s could not have lived in any of Donald Trump's buildings, so it just seems to me that maybe she's just not that politically savvy, or maybe she's just not read in, but it's problematic.”
Friday moderator Joy Behar took a two-for-one swipe after the former President and First Lady when sniped: “You got to love the little birther. You know what I’m saying? We all appreciate the female body, Melania. Listen, your husband appreciated Stormy Daniels' body plenty, right?”
A year ago, on The View’s Behind the Table podcast, executive producer Brian Teta explained that while they do work for ABC News and answer to the same Standards and Practices department, “We’re an opinion show. We’re speaking off-the-cuff.”
But yet, the MRC’s findings for The View closely resembled the MRC’s study of ABC’s World News Tonight’s coverage of Trump and Harris. As the study found, the evening newscast gave Trump 100% negative coverage vs 93% positive coverage for Harris.
In the week preceding the attempted assassination, The View was watched by 2.275 million viewers. If the numbers held, over 2 million people saw that negativity.
METHODOLOGY: To determine the spin of news coverage, our analysts tallied all explicitly evaluative statements about each candidate from either reporters, anchors or non-partisan sources such as experts or voters. Evaluations from partisan sources, as well as neutral statements, were not included.
As we did in 2016 and 2020, we separated personal evaluations of each candidate from statements about their prospects in the campaign horse race (i.e., standings in the polls, chances to win, etc.). While such comments can have an effect on voters (creating a bandwagon effect for those seen as winning, or demoralizing the supports of those portrayed as losing), they are not “good press” or “bad press” as understood by media scholars as far back as Michael Robinson’s groundbreaking research on the 1980 presidential campaign.
