In an interview with Deadline published last week, Brian Teta [pictured right], the executive producer of ABC’s The View, admitted that they have “stopped asking” former President Trump to be on the show, and requests would resume on a “case-by-case” basis depending on who he picked as vice president. On the flipside, Teta expected President Biden to make an appearance to get a tongue bath from the co-hosts sometime before the election.
Unironically, he claimed their main sticking point was “disinformation” and “misinformation” making its way onto the show.
Deadline broached the subject by way of NBC’s snafu with former RNC chairwoman Ronna McDaniel. “Would you have on as a guest a [Trump] true believer, maybe even McDaniel?” Deadline wondered. “You know, I have to look at it,” Teta said. “But we made the choice not to consider election deniers when we did our co-host search. The disinformation part of it is something to consider always.”
On whether or not they planned to have Trump on the ABC News program, Teta admitted that they’ve “stopped asking” him to come on the show because he keeps declining, but also added that his “misinformation” played a key role in their decision too:
DEADLINE: Given that we’re getting further and further into the election year, are you considering having Trump or any of his surrogates on the show?
TETA: Again, it’s case by case. We’ll see who the VP is, when they’re announcing. We’ve invited Trump to join us at the table for both 2016 and 2020 elections, and he declined, and at a certain point, we stopped asking. So I don’t anticipate that changing. I think he’s pretty familiar with how the co-hosts feels about him and doesn’t see himself coming here.
There’s no question we reach an important audience. This season we had Tim Scott on. We’ve had prominent Republicans on often and will continue to. We had Ted Cruz on last year. That’s what the show is. That’s the genius of what Barbara Walters and Bill Geddie put together here, a show of different perspectives. And I think that it’s an important thing for us to do that. But at the same time, we’re not going to put people on there to [spread] misinformation.
In another part of the interview, Teta claimed that The View was still held to ABC’s “news standards.”
“Even though we’re an opinion show, we’re governed by news standards, so we would call out anything like that in real time [sic],” he defended the show.
Apparently, the spreading of “disinformation” and “misinformation” on the show was something reserved for the co-hosts to do.
In regards to Monday’s solar eclipse and the previous week’s earthquake in New Jersey, staunchly racist and anti-Semitic co-host, Sunny Hostin (the descendant of slave owners) asserted, without evidence, that both were caused by “climate change.” She said the same thing about the coming cicada mating season despite them being on a known breeding schedule .
The show’s other forays into “disinformation” and “misinformation” in recent weeks included claiming Robert F. Kennedy Jr. was trying to “buy” the election, pushed the “bloodbath” hoax against Trump, claimed migrant women don’t get raped in or near the U.S., Hostin claimed former U.N. Ambassador Nikki Haley didn’t really miss her deployed husband, and Joy Behar claimed NATO was the military alliance that beat Adolf Hitler and the Nazis. Just to name a few.
Being on top of The View’s lies and calling out their hypocrisy like this was important because, as the Deadline article noted: “The show has been up 3% in total viewers season to date, and has continued to top daytime talk shows and news programs in viewership and households.”