Fans of ABC’s The View were baffled once again Friday morning when the daytime talk show aired with no mention of Jimmy Kimmel’s show being suspended.
For the second consecutive day, The View’s “Hot Topics” did not include the indefinite suspension of their fellow ABC host Jimmy Kimmel. Instead, Joy Behar opened the show by discussing an excerpt from Kamala Harris’ new book about originally wanting to pick Pete Buttigieg as her running mate.
The following segment focused on Martha Stewart’s “thirst trap” photos and after that they aired an interview with actress Lily James.
This comes after the show on Thursday opted to discuss FBI Director Kash Patel’s congressional hearing and whether couples should break up before getting married.
In both cases, viewers of the show were quick to notice the glaring omission.
The View’s top YouTube comments this week include lines like, “The silence about Jimmy is deafening” and “I had a bad feeling they were not going to speak about Kimmel. I am so disappointed.”
And as soon as The View shared its segment about Harris on X, it was met with loud backlash from fans.
“I’ve noticed that THE VIEW HAS not mentioned Jimmy Kimmel in hot topics! Could it be that they are forbidden to say anything since it’s the same net work? So much for FREE SPEECH!” one person replied.
“The View went after CBS for Colbert, but have nothing to say about Kimmel? I expected better from you,” another said.
It’s true that The View hosts were outspoken about CBS’ decision to cancel The Late Show With Stephen Colbert this past July. In that case, the news broke Thursday evening after they had taped that week’s shows and they did not address the story until the following Tuesday, after Colbert had a chance to respond on his show.
On that show, moderator Whoopi Goldberg told Colbert, “We got your back” while reserving further judgment before seeing “how this shakes out.”
Co-host Sunny Hostin went much further, saying, “People on the right should be concerned. People on the left should be concerned, because it’s very clear that if it is political, this is the dismantling of our democracy. This is the dismantling of our Constitution.”
While this Thursday’s episode aired live, Friday’s show, per usual, was taped in advance Thursday afternoon before FCC Chair Brendan Carr issued renewed threats against The View directly.
“I think it’s worthwhile to have the FCC look into whether The View and some of the programs that you have still qualify as bona fide news programs and therefore exempt from the equal opportunity regime that Congress has put in place,” an emboldened Carr said Thursday after ABC showed fealty to the Trump administration by yanking Kimmel’s late-night show.
The decision to pull Kimmel off the air followed similar threats from Carr to cancel ABC’s broadcast license over what he has described as deliberate disinformation—in the form of jokes—from Kimmel about the Charlie Kirk assassination.
The comments that enraged the Trump administration did not, as Carr and others have suggested, “explicitly” label Kirk’s killer as MAGA.
Rather, Kimmel said on Monday, “We hit some new lows over the weekend with the MAGA gang desperately trying to characterize this kid who murdered Charlie Kirk as anything other than one of them and doing everything they can to score political points from it.”
And yet, despite—or perhaps, because of—the show’s apparently precarious position at ABC, they have now completely ignored the nation’s hottest topic for the second episode in a row.
While fans have been left flummoxed, it should not be that surprising given what the Daily Beast reported earlier this year about Disney CEO Bob Iger’s instructions to The View to tone down its rhetoric about Donald Trump.
There has been no direct indication that ABC or Disney brass told The View hosts not to discuss Kimmel’s suspension or its free speech implications. And the show has continued to criticize the Trump administration on a broader level.
But as the fans have pointed out, their silence on this particular hot topic has been deafening.
The post ABC’s ‘The View’ Ignores Kimmel for Second Day in a Row appeared first on The Daily Beast.
