“The View” co-hosts accused White House Correspondents’ Association (WHCA) president Eugene Daniels of capitulating to President Donald Trump after Daniels announced the journalist group would be canceling an appearance by anti-Trump comedian Amber Ruffin at its annual dinner.
“It seems to me when you capitulate and give in to a bully, that bully will continue bullying you,” co-host Sunny Hostin said during the daytime talk show on Monday.
“So this White House has taken control of the White House Correspondents’ Association, many of its duties, including who’s going on in the press pool. Now they’re rearranging the seats in the briefing room so that legacy media is going to be in the back and some right-wing podcaster is going to be in the front. I think you stand united as a press corps, and you do things that you’ve always done. This has been an association since 1921,” she continued.
Daniels wrote in a statement that the board unanimously decided to drop a comedic performance for the dinner as part of a “re-envisioning” of the tradition.
“At this consequential moment for journalism, I want to ensure the focus is not on the politics of division but entirely on awarding our colleagues for their outstanding work and providing scholarship and mentorship to the next generation of journalists,” he wrote.
WHITE HOUSE REPORTERS ALREADY ‘EXHAUSTED’ BY SECOND TRUMP ADMINISTRATION
“When you talk about false equivalency, there is a false equivalency. She’s a comedian. She’s not a journalist. I think that it’s a time-honored tradition, and I think – I know Eugene Daniels very well – I think he made the wrong call. I think he capitulated just like Chuck Schumer did,” Hostin added, referring to the Democratic Senate Minority Leader who recently received harsh criticism from the left for supporting a Republican-backed spending bill that avoided a government shutdown.
Co-host Ana Navarro agreed and said she was disappointed by the removal of Ruffin.
“I’m very disappointed, first of all, because Amber Ruffin is really funny. Also, because Amber Ruffin is a Black woman and queer. I think these are communities that feel that we’re being erased, that we’re under attack,” Navarro said.
“It comes after attack, after attack on the press. And after we have seen media capitulating to him, and corporate America capitulating to him, and law firms capitulating to him. And so, I think it’s very disappointing to see all of these institutions bending a knee and giving in to the bully that is never going to give up bullying you because you’ve just emboldened and legitimized them,” she continued.
Whoopi Goldberg said the decision to cancel Ruffin’s appearance seemed like another “hack at free speech,” which she said made her more uncomfortable than anything.
Navarro went on to invite Ruffin to do her performance on “The View.”
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Co-host Alyssa Farah Griffin agreed with the decision to remove Ruffin from the Correspondents’ Dinner after watching a recent clip of Ruffin calling Trump administration officials “murderers” and suggesting they weren’t human during an interview on The Daily Beast podcast.
“The most important thing that journalists need to do in this moment is be able to show that they can objectively, without fear or favor, cover this administration, and ‘objectively’ is the keyword. And for a lot of Americans, when there’s record-high distrust in the media, if you have them sitting in a room with somebody who basically said Trump Administration officials are subhuman, they’re a bunch of murderers, it adds to distrust in the press. It comes off as kind of a tacit endorsement of what she said,” Griffin said.
Griffin added that Daniels is a serious journalist and applauded the “prudent” decision.
Ruffin discussed what material she planned to include in her Correspondents’ Dinner performance, telling The Daily Beast on Thursday, “I’m not 100% interested in being like, ‘Ha, you’re here. Look at your stupid head. You’re burned.’ I care, like, ‘You’re kind of a bunch of murderers.’ They were like, ‘You need to be equal and make sure that you give it to both sides and blah blah blah.’ I was like, ‘There’s no way I am going to be freaking doing that dude. Under no circumstances.'”
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