The View

Joy Behar, ever the comedienne, sent family and friends a Christmas card this year featuring a Photoshopped picture of her hugging Fox News's Bill O'Reilly.

The Huffington Post appears to be the first to publish its contents which included tidings to "Muslims and Jews and Catholics and Atheists (not agnostics - too wishy washy) and Mama Grizzlies and Democrats and Republicans and Tea Partiers":

Time's Joe Klein, ABC's Christiane Amanpour, and CBS's Lesley Stahl were just three journalists to see an outrageously biased quote of theirs land in the Best of Notable Quotables 2010.

A panel of 46 radio talk show hosts, magazine editors, columnists, editorial writers, and expert media observers chose the winners, and our news analysts introduce them and a few others in this highlight lowlight reel put together by Media Research Center video producer Bob Parks:

On Thursday, NewsBusters made it clear that no matter how Sarah Palin answered Katie Couric's pathetic reading list question back in 2008, the liberal media were going to ridicule her.

On Friday, this point was made even clearer when Mark Levin told his radio audience that Palin's answer to Barbara Walters' same question on ABC's "10 Most Fascinating People of 2010" was edited to remove his best-selling book "Liberty and Tyranny" (audio follows courtesy Right Scoop):

  Appearing as a guest on Saturday’s Huckabee show on FNC, Whoopi Goldberg - co-host of ABC’s The View - complained that bloggers disseminate inaccurate information about her without the need to "fact check," and that "they poop on you and they walk away." Goldberg: "But a blogger can say endless stuff. They don't have to fact check. ... And then that is picked up and made into some other story on another station, and it becomes the truth. See, I think fact outweighs assumption. So if you have facts in your hands, then you can talk, then you can have a conversation... People just, they poop on you and they walk away."

After asserting that she has said "not one thing" on ABC’s The View that she regrets saying, Goldberg soon added, "And I've gotten flack for what I felt was fact as opposed to someone's speculation."

But Goldberg has her own history of helping spread misinformation on The View. Last May, she and other co-hosts repeated the distorted claims of a left-wing organization in Texas which alleged that conservatives on the Texas State Board of Education were trying to downplay or eliminate references to slavery in its grade school history curriculum. On the Monday, May 17 show, Behar misinformed viewers with sarcasm: "Remember that thing called the 'slave trade'? Remember that? Okay, it turns out, what you learned was all wrong. Because it wasn't some evil buying and selling of human beings. It was simply called 'Atlantic triangular trade.' That's what they want to call it now. It's called revisionism. People do it about the Holocaust, and now Texas wants to do it about our country."

Moments later, Goldberg chimed in, "I’m sorry. Slavery was slavery. You can’t recall it." Instead of reading out the actual wording from the curriculum plan, panel members seemed only to refer to third-party accounts of the proposed changes.

And in April, the panel on the View helped feed the misinformed hysteria over Arizona’s effort to enforce federal immigration laws as some of her co-hosts assumed the new state law would require racial profiling and targeting of Hispanics, failing to convey that Arizona law enforcement would only check immigration documents of suspects who have been detained for some other reason. Goldberg acted more as moderator on this occasion and was not as outspoken as other co-hosts in making assertions about the new law, but she did not challenge the claims of her co-hosts and seemed to assume they were accurate. Goldberg, from the April 26 The View:

ABC's "The View" hosted pastor Joel Osteen Tuesday, author of the book The Christmas Spirit – but the conversation took a controversial turn and went from Christmas to homosexuality. Co-host Joy Behar belittled Osteen about his conservative Christian beliefs on the matter.

ABC's Barbara Walters first popped the question in the middle of the interview, flagging it was a "controversial" topic. She referenced a previous quote made by Osteen on the show about homosexuality not being "God's best" for a person's life. Walters asked him how he felt about a Georgia pastor who recently came out and said he was gay.

After Osteen's tepid response, Behar interrupted him and flatly lectured him that homosexuality is natural. "It's not a choice, Pastor," she asserted. "It's not a choice, and therefore I don't think that God would look askance at homosexuality in that way, because it's not a choice. They're born this way, people are born this way."

[Video embedded after page break]
 

MSNBC's Joe Scarborough blames Sarah Palin for the GOP's failure to capture the Senate because of her efforts in drafting candidates who were defeated in Delaware and Nevada.

"But for Sarah Palin, the Republican Party would control the Senate right now," the former Florida congressman stated on ABC's "The View" Thursday.

"She's not a national ticket," he added when the conversation turned to her possible 2012 Presidential run. "Who thinks seriously that she can get 51 percent?"

Scarborough was frank with his words on the hit daytime show, discussing Sarah Palin, colleague Keith Olbermann's suspension, and why he thinks his "Morning Joe" program is a success. He praised his own show for its "transparency," that the audience knows the political views of each of the hosts.
 

Former New York City mayor Rudy Giuliani took on the ladies of "The View" along with their highly-partisan audience Wednesday in a post-election discussion about Sarah Palin, Barack Obama, and healthcare reform.

So strongly did most of those in attendance disagree with Giuliani that he ended saying "You don't get it" when they booed him for criticizing the President (video follows with partial transcript and commentary):

Joy Behar admits she made a "mistake," sort of.

After angrily denouncing Nevada Senate candidate Sharron Angle (R) as a "bitch" who will "go to Hell" for her "Hitler youth commercial" in which she criticizes Democrat Harry Reid's position on illegal immigration, "The View" co-host sarcastically retracted part of her joyless insult.

"I really shouldn't have called her a bitch because to me that's a term of endearment," snickered Behar. "I reserve that word for people that I know and love. That was a mistake and I take it back. I mean, the fact that she approved a racist ad, that is the point that I wanted to get through to the people – not the word bitch."

Video embedded after the page break:

Barbara Walters on Wednesday told Joy Behar she's so offensive to so many people they will give money to folks she doesn't like.

This marvelously was "The View" co-host's response to Nevada Republican senatorial candidate Sharron Angle raising $150,000 online after Behar called her a bitch on Tuesday's program (video follows with transcript and commentary):

Comparing her latest campaign spot to a "Hitler Youth commercial," "The View" co-host Joy Behar angrily pronounced that Nevada Senate candidate Sharron Angle (R) is a "bitch" who will "go to Hell" for her ad.

While none of the four co-hosts agreed with the tone of Angle's ad, Behar was the most vicious in her attack on Angle, calling her a "moron" and insisting she should try out her campaign rhetoric in the south Bronx [Video embedded after the page break]:

If you were wondering just how far to the left Joy Behar's political views skew, wonder no more.

Discussing National Public Radio's firing of Juan Williams, Behar pitched the tired line that NPR is actually a middle of the road news organization. Her logic (I use the term loosely): "NPR has been vetted by objective Media Matter-type people and they have found that…NPR is very balanced."

You know it's time to recalibrate your metrics for political neutrality when the far-left blog Media Matters earns the label "objective" (video and transcript below the fold).

 

Smearing Bill O'Reilly as an "extremist" and a "jackass fool," MSNBC anchor Dylan Ratigan fired back at the Fox News Channel host for saying Muslims "killed us on 9/11." On his Friday afternoon MSNBC show, the liberal host launched a blistering attack on O'Reilly and accused him of lying and being a "fearmonger."

O'Reilly made his remarks in a heated debate on ABC's "The View" Thursday, where two of the show's co-hosts then stormed off the set after his remark about Muslims. When pressed as to why the mosque near Ground Zero was so controversial, O'Reilly answered that it was because Muslims "killed us on 9/11."

After the clip of the incident played, Ratigan snidely asked "I suppose that means we're now supposed to kill all the Muslims. Isn't that the current – that's the tit-for-tat, no?" He then descended into his rant against O'Reilly, President Bush, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and Israel.
 

Against the opinion of the "Morning Joe" panel (and Barbara Walters herself), NBC's Norah O'Donnell half-defended Joy Behar and Whoopi Goldberg for brazenly walking off the set of ABC's "The View" when guest Bill O'Reilly got too controversial for them.

Without saying that she personally was okay with Goldberg's and Behar's stunt, O'Donnell hinted that they had a legitimate reason for doing so. "You know, if Whoopi and Joy felt that [O'Reilly] was being demeaning to them, they felt like they should walk off," she posited.

The MSNBC reporter was a fill-in co-host on Friday's MSNBC's "Morning Joe" along with brew crew regular contributor Willie Geist. Guest and columnist Mike Barnicle was the first to disagree with her sentiment. "Stay there," he said about Behar and Goldberg, "Keep going. Confront [O'Reilly]."

O'Donnell was careful not to heatedly argue the point further, but rather was content to echo the responses from Barnicle and Geist.
 

If you can’t stand the heat, then don’t invite Bill O’Reilly on your show to talk about current events. Whoopi Goldberg and Joy Behar flew off the handle during a live taping of “The View” on Thursday, storming off-stage during a dispute with O’Reilly over the Ground Zero mosque.

O’Reilly set the two women off after he said that, “Muslims killed us on 9/11.” Goldberg took offense at the statement, exclaiming “That is such bull----!”

“Extremists did that!” yelled a clearly agitated Goldberg. “What religion was Mr. McVeigh? There was an extremist as well and he killed people --”

(video below fold)

So you raise five children and provide foster care for 23 children, but according to HLN’s high-priestess of intellectualism, you hate children.

Only from Joy Behar, host of a HLN show and co-host of “The View,” could offer such an assertion as fact to audience. On Behar’s Oct. 12 program, she made the claim the Rep. Michele Bachmann, R-Minn., and other so-called “Mama Grizzlies” were guilty of various misdeeds against humanity. She claimed the Republican Minnesota congresswoman was anti-children, but not before condemning her for not publicly rebuking Carl Paladino for his remarks about gay and lesbian issues.

Video Below Fold

When I think of people well-suited to lead a crusade against declining public civility, somehow Whoopi Goldberg doesn't spring to mind.  Yet there was The View co-host on Morning Joe today, promoting what Amazon describes as: "her new book of observations [that] takes a funny and excruciatingly honest look at how a loss of civility is messing with the quality of life for all of us."

And sure enough, Whoopi engaged in a [seemingly endless] discussion with the MJ folks on the subject.  Mika read a passage from the book in which Goldberg bemoaned the rise of "political incivility."  Added Whoopi "it's not just the politicians. It's also just human beings interacting."

You mean, human beings like . . . Whoopi Goldberg?  Just last month, while the debate over the Ground Zero mosque was raging, our Lachlan Markay caught Whoopi in a blatant breach of civility.

On the September 15 The View on ABC, co-host Joy Behar insisted that co-host Elisabeth Hasselbeck was wrong to assert that taxes are set to increase in January as the two sparred over the issue. Behar: "It's not an increase, Elisabeth. It is not an increase." She soon added, "They are not, stop saying it's an increase because it's not." After Hasselbeck shot back, "Okay, we’ll talk in January," Behar continued, "The Democrats want to eliminate the tax cuts for the rich. That's all. Stop doing that."

Behar also exaggerated the anti-big government views of the Tea Party movement, claiming that members "don’t believe in any government at all, zero," and mocked activists for supposedly not realizing that Medicare and Social Security are run by the federal government. Behar: "They just don't believe in any government at all, zero. At the same time, it's fascinating about them, at the same time that they don't believe in any government, a lot of them are like, ‘Don't touch my Medicare.’ Well, what do you think that is? That's the schism within the Tea Party. Don't touch my Social Security. Get the government out of my house, you know, come on."

Catching up on an item from the Thursday, September 9, The View on ABC, Barbara Walters was at odds with her co-hosts over the issue of whether racism was the primary motivation of the Arizona illegal immigration law as well as opposition to the Ground Zero mosque. Whoopi Goldberg raised the question of whether "there may be an undercurrent of racism in the USA that’s building up," leading co-host Sherri Shepherd to assert that "you certainly hear racism a lot more, I think, than you ever heard it." Walters soon jumped in to voice dissent:

I think that we're kind of mixing things up. When you say there's more racism now, oh, there's so much less racism than 20 years ago or 50 years ago. ... There is racism in this country. That's not new. There is racism against the President. That's not new. But I disagree with putting the mosque and the Arizona laws. I think the Arizona laws have to do with losing jobs and people coming across the border to get those jobs.

After Goldberg responded, "Then why don't they say that?" Walters continued:

Comedian Joy Behar repeated her 'View' tirade against Christine O'Donnell on her eponymous HLN network program yesterday, denouncing the Delaware Republican Senate nominee as "crazy" and suggesting she should see a psychotherapist.

"You know, I'm not a shrink, but this is the crazy train this girl is on," chortled Behar, who also belittled O'Donnell on ABC's "The View" yesterday. After maligning O'Donnell's character, Behar suggested the social conservative could benefit from therapy: "I believe in psychotherapy. Maybe she should go to a shrink."

Behar's guest, psychotherapist Robi Ludwig, did not take the bait: "I don't know that much about her. But we also need to allow people to change as they grow. Express themselves when they're young, make mistakes and change their point of view. Do we really think that she's into witchcraft? I don't really buy it."

Comedian Joy Behar seemed to enjoy herself as she muckraked through exotic comments made by Republican Delaware U.S. Senate nominee Christine O'Donnell over a decade ago, refusing to leave them out of a serious discussion about O'Donnell's candidacy. She even threw Sarah Palin into the mix.

O'Donnell, in a 1999 appearance on Bill Maher's "Politically Incorrect," said that she "dabbled into witchcraft" in high school but never joined a coven. Behar lambasted O'Donnell, calling her "crazy" and wondering why she was running for office. "I think it shows you how crazy the girl is, doesn't it?" Behar asked incredulously. "How many crazy people do we have to have in office?"

Behar labeled O'Donnell as a "witch who doesn't masturbate." Meanwhile, the show's token conservative Elisabeth Hasselbeck countered that if O'Donnell is under the gun for such comments, then President Obama should have been scrutinized more closely over his pastor of 20 years, the Rev. Jeremiah Wright.

Even veteran liberal journalist and 'View' co-host Barbara Walters dismissed the notion of serious discussion of O'Donnell's comments from 10 or 20 years ago, and argued that her current views on social issues should be scrutinized.

The View's resident political sage Whoopi Goldberg offered her usual degree of intellectualism on Wednesaday's show, when she told people protesting against the Ground Zero mosque to "kiss my butt" and "get out of here."

Apparently fed up with Americans voicing their collective discontent with individuals and actions they find highly offensive, Whoopi stated (video below the fold):

The fact that there were protests on 9/11 really also irritated me. You know what, I don't have time to listen to your side or your side. This is about the people that lost their lives. That's why we're coming together. And the fact that y'all are fighting in the streets - kiss my butt, get out of here.

Interviewing White House senior adviser Valerie Jarrett yesterday, The View's liberal co-hosts repelled Elisabeth Hasslebeck's tough questions on President Obama's failed economic agenda by changing the subject and ignoring their conservative colleague's criticism.

Refuting the claim that the economy is "certainly moving in the right direction" despite dismal unemployment numbers, Hasselbeck asked Jarrett if Obama's $50 billion infrastructure bill represents an "admittance of failure on the $800 billion stimulus bill that didn't seem to work."

To sidestep Hasselbeck's question, Jarrett invoked incredulity, flawed statistics, and historical revisionism:

As part of the 5th anniversary celebration of NewsBusters we have started a weekly Five for Five feature to list the blog's top twenty five posts. Last time, we looked at the top five posts on journalistic Obamagasms. On Friday we concluded with the top five posts of outrageous media outbursts.

We have picked out a couple posts from each of the five categories and asked the authors to reflect back on writing them up. In this series of short videos, they share their thoughts on how they caught the particular media moment and describe the impact their post had.

We finish our video look back by reflecting on two of top posts of outrageous media outbursts: "Rosie O'Donnell Spouts 9/11 Conspiracies: 'First Time in History Fire Has Ever Melted Steel'" by Justin McCarthy (reflection by Rich Noyes) and "Maher Buys Into Claim Sarah Palin's Baby Son Really Her Grandson" by Brent Baker.

Check out the last video of NewsBusters' Tim Graham and Kyle Drennen remembering some of the top posts on journalistic Obamagasms.

Although there are few tough interviews on ABC's "The View" – this was an exception to the rule – Vice President Joe Biden received a surprisingly more serious reception than did President Obama on the daytime celebrity show. He even had a snide remark for Whoopi Goldberg about high taxes for the wealthy.

As Newsbusters reported, President Obama's interview was essentially a rousing festival of praise for the administration and Obama's family. By contrast, Vice President Biden's interview, although by no means tough, was missing the slew of softball questions that Obama enjoyed. There were even some awkward exchanges between Biden and co-hosts Barbara Walters and Whoopi Goldberg, on the issues of foreign policy and taxes, respectively.

While the show's hosts continually fawned over President Obama, token conservative co-host Elisabeth Hasselbeck soon brought up Biden's infamous F-bomb gaffe at the health care bill's signing. Sherri Shepherd followed up by asking about the administration's answers for angry Tea Partiers, and Whoopi Goldberg then pressed about the problem of high taxes.

Biden quipped, "You have a lot of money, that's why it bothers you," before assuring Goldberg that he was kidding.

Over 6.5 million people watched President Obama on Thursday surrounded by gushing females sitting on a couch.

Tells you a lot about the state of the union, doesn't it?

Of course, the bigger question is whether folks were tuning in to ABC's "The View" that day to watch Joy Behar faint in His presence or to see if the lone conservative Elisabeth Hasselbeck was actually going to ask the President a tough question.

Unfortunately, those hoping for either were deeply disappointed.

Regardless, ABC proudly released the numbers along with some truly hysterical opinions Friday (h/t TV By The Numbers):

On Thursday's CBS Early Show, senior White House correspondent Bill Plante praised President Obama taping an appearance on ABC's 'The View' on Wednesday: "...the President is trying to reach people who may not normally pay attention to politics....It's not the first time [he] has reached out to audiences beyond the Washington Beltway."

Plante went further, explaining: "...it is the beginning of the Democrats' strategy to try to save their majority in Congress." He touted how Obama "blamed Republicans for holding up a bill with tax cuts for small business" while visiting a New Jersey sandwich shop. Plante then highlighted the President's fundraising ability: "Two fund-raisers in Manhattan on behalf of congressional Democrats....it cost 100 guests $30,400 each....That cash will help finance the Democrats' election year strategy."

Plante concluded his report by pointing to DNC talking points for the election: "Party Chairman Tim Kaine laid it out, charging that the Republican Party and tea party have become one in the same." He then remarked: "That's what you'll be hearing for the next three months. Meanwhile, the President will continue to vacuum up campaign dollars."

Plante made no mention of Democratic Pennsylvania Governor Ed Rendell criticizing the President's View appearance as undignified or the fact that Obama skipped attending the Boy Scouts 100th Anniversary celebration in Washington to go on the show and fundraise.