The hosts of ABC’s daytime talk show “The View” on Monday weighed in for the first time on Jimmy Kimmel’s show getting pulled from the air, criticizing the Trump administration for putting pressure on the network before the decision was made.
It was also the first time the show aired live since a top Trump administration official said that “The View” could come under scrutiny, too.
“Someone can say something they shouldn’t and get taken off the air, but the government cannot apply pressure to force someone to be silenced,” said Whoopi Goldberg, a longtime host of “The View.”
ABC pulled Mr. Kimmel’s show “indefinitely” last Wednesday after conservatives said he inaccurately described the politics of the man accused of fatally shooting the right-wing activist Charlie Kirk. The network announced later on Monday that his show would return on Tuesday.
The network removed “Jimmy Kimmel Live!” from its schedule a few hours after Brendan Carr, chairman of the Federal Communications Commission, argued in a podcast that Mr. Kimmel’s remarks were part of a “concerted effort to lie to the American people,” and said that the agency was “going to have remedies that we can look at.”
“Frankly, when you see stuff like this — I mean, we can do this the easy way or the hard way,” Mr. Carr told the podcast’s host, Benny Johnson.
Mr. Carr brought up “The View” in another interview the next day, arguing that it was “worthwhile to have the F.C.C. look into” the ABC daytime talk show.
The hosts avoided Mr. Carr’s specific comments about their show but they spoke directly about the administration in the opening minutes of Monday’s edition of “The View.” Ms. Goldberg said they avoided discussing Mr. Kimmel last Thursday to “take a breath” and see if Mr. Kimmel commented on the situation, and that Friday’s episode had been pretaped. (Mr. Kimmel has not commented.)
“Look, did you all really think we weren’t going to talk about Jimmy Kimmel?” Ms. Goldberg said. “I mean, have you watched the show over the last 29 seasons? So you know, no one silences us.”
The program aired a clip of Mr. Trump aboard Air Force One musing over whether broadcast networks should have licenses removed for airing critical coverage of his administration, and how that would be “up to Brendan Carr.”
“No, it’s not up to Brendan Carr,” Ms. Goldberg said in response. “It is not up to him. I don’t understand how you are the man in charge of the nation and you still don’t understand how the First Amendment works.”
Ana Navarro, another host, said “the government itself is using its weight and power to bully and scare people into silence,” before making a reference to the power that media companies have at such a moment.
“Look, we have seen tech titans go into the Oval Office,” she said. “We are seeing media moguls, publishers of newspapers, we are seeing all of them try to make the peace with Donald Trump. A bully always comes back for more. So they need to stand up and we need to demand the same from ourselves.”
Ms. Goldberg closed the conversation talking about the importance of free speech.
“We talk about freedom of speech a lot because we are always in somebody’s mess because somebody has decided that we have said something that’s offensive,” she said. “But we fight for everybody’s right to have freedom of speech because it means my speech is free, it means your speech is free.”
John Koblin covers the television industry for The Times.
The post ‘The View’ Hosts Criticize Trump Administration Over Kimmel appeared first on New York Times.
