Sunny Hostin made a striking comparison between Morning Joe hosts Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski’s sit down with Donald Trump at Mar-a-Lago and Fox News host Sean Hannity’s texts to the White House on Jan. 6, 2021.
“I think we saw a blurring of the lines, [like] with Sean Hannity’s texts and Mark Meadows during the insurrection,” Hostin said on The View Thursday of the hosts’ “on background” meeting with Trump. “You can sit down as a journalist and have a dialogue without traveling to Mar-a-Lago, having a meeting off the record [and] having a meeting on background after having said all these things [about Trump on-air].”
Hannity (along with other Fox News hosts Laura Ingraham and Brian Kilmeade) repeatedly texted Trump’s then chief of staff Mark Meadows as Trump’s supporters attacked the Capitol, begging him to get the president to condemn their actions. Hostin said the MSNBC hosts’ sit-down with Trump was another example of the “blurred lines” he has had with Fox News journalists.
Scarborough and Brzezinski took 20 minutes out of their broadcast Thursday morning to hit back at critics’ of their Trump visit. “You will be smarter and you have been over the last several weeks because of what we talked about with Donald Trump for an hour, hour and a half,” Scarborough said, heated, as he compared he and Brzezinski to the “great reporters” at the New York Times, The Washington Post, The Wall Street, and other publications.
“I’m yet to talk to a journalist [who said], ‘You shouldn’t talk to the president on background,’” he continues in the clip. “The complaint that we said he was a fascist, that he talked like a fascist—yeah, he did during the campaign. Guess what? That means it’s even more important we go there.”
Though several View hosts including Joy Behar, Alyssa Farah Griffin, and Sara Haines added their own defenses of the hosts, Hostin wasn’t swayed—claiming as she has before that going to Mar-a-Lago was “kissing his ring.”
“Any journalist has to be able to report the facts fairly without fear of retribution,” Hostin also said Thursday, “and I think one of the criticisms that they are getting is that they traipsed over to Mar-a-Lago because of their fear of retribution and their fear of losing their access.” She added, “That’s why I think Morning Joe [ratings are] down 38 per cent.”
When Griffin countered that having a journalistic sit-down with the president-elect at his place of choice is “a different thing” than “texting with the White House chief of staff about an insurrection,” Hostin wasn’t buying it.
“They were also exchanging messages because they had that kind of access,” Hostin said, resolved. “You can have that kind of access, like Bob Woodward’s, and still uphold the principles of journalism and keep the trust of the people.”
“If you just have right-wingers interviewing Trump and only people who are journalists that support Trump, you’re not going to get important stories for the American people,” Griffin said.
As Whoopi Goldberg opined that we “can’t get anywhere” because “everything contains blowback,” to the crowd’s applause, Hostin argued that the blowback, in this case, was justified.
“When you see that 38 per cent of your audience is saying ‘Wow you made me feel so uncomfortable, I’m going to turn the channel,’ I do think that requires a little bit of introspection as to why people are feeling that way,” she concluded.
