Whoopi Goldberg is reminding everyone that while she often gives her political opinions on The View, she is by no means considered a journalist.
On this morning’s episode of the hit daytime talk show, the ladies had a fiery debate over Morning Joe host Joe Scarborough and his wife Mika Brzezinski meeting with president-elect Donald Trump at Mar-a-Lago — and whether the backlash they’ve been receiving from viewers is warranted.
“You know what I’m not? I’m not a journalist. I’m gonna start with that,” Goldberg said after Joy Behar was critical of the couple. “My feelings about this are very different.”
For Goldberg, it shouldn’t matter that they went to meet with Trump if that’s what made them feel better.
“If people feel they need to do something, let them do what they need to do,” she said. “Do I think they should’ve gone? Does it matter? They went! And they are explaining. And I don’t know why we can’t just have somebody say, ‘And this is why I did it.’ And move on.”
According to the moderator, the “blowback” Scarborough and Brzezinski have been getting is “part of [her] problem.”
“We can’t get anywhere because everything contains blowback,” she fumed. “Because [people] make it so hard to say, ‘You know what? I feel like I need to do this for my own peace of mind. I know this guy. I don’t like what he did, but I know that I’m gonna have to talk about him some more so let me go down.’ Let these people do what they do!”
While Behar argued that talk show hosts (like Scarborough and Brzezinski) are different than investigative journalists, Goldberg offered a different perspective.
“This is why I say I’m not a journalist — we are painted as journalists because people assume that we went to [school] — I didn’t go to school,” she said. “I went to school until the eighth grade.”
Alyssa Farah Griffin agreed, describing herself as a “partisan opinion-haver” who would “still meet with any subject that I regularly talk about to ask questions.”
The View airs on weekdays at 11/10c on ABC.
