‘Everyone Inside ABC News Is on One Side’: ABC Looking to Revamp The View

ABC News has plans to revamp The View in light of Donald Trump’s commanding win in the 2024 election. ABC execs are said to be panicking over the fact that their roundtable features a collection of women who are uniformly aligned with Democrats despite the fact that Trump appears to have won the popular vote and won 46% of women voters, a 3% improvement over 2020. If 46% of women voted for Trump, maybe the view could find one woman to represent that perspective on the show?

ABC News brass are in “panic mode” as they hunt for conservative voices to balance the rabid anti-Trump rhetoric spewed by the hosts on “The View,” as well as those on other shows, The Post has learned…

First on the agenda, according to one insider, is finding a pro-Trump panelist for its top-ranked daytime talk show, co-hosted by ultra-liberals Whoopi Goldberg, Joy Behar, Sunny Hostin and Sara Haines, as well as Republican Trump-bashers Ana Navarro and Alyssa Farah Griffin.

“The View is facing pressure from higher-ups,” the source said. “Viewers can expect some major changes including bringing in new panelists that can bring in a pro-Trump perspective.”

The best line in the story comes from a second source who said ABC execs weren’t sure how the whole network could credibly move forward given that everyone in the organization is on the same side as the View hosts.

“We are trying to sort out how we cover the next 4 years when everyone inside ABC News is on one side,” the person said, speaking broadly about the network, which is also home to “Good Morning America” and “World News Tonight.”

Talk about a poorly kept secret. But honestly at least they have (privately) acknowledged the problem. That’s more than most of these news outlets have been willing to do. But they’re not doing it out of the goodness of their liberal hearts. They are belatedly realizing they need to change or they could see their ratings collapse. As one anonymous source said, “At the end of the day, these changes aren’t about politics. They are about economics.”

As I pointed out yesterday, MSNBC is having its own problems, having lost a significant share of its audience in the week after the election. Today even the NY Times has a story up about the sharp decline.

“The Rachel Maddow Show,” the liberal network’s highest-rated program, drew 1.3 million viewers on Monday, about a million shy of her October average, according to Nielsen. In a crucial ratings metric — viewers under the age of 54 — it was the least-watched edition of the show since April 2022.

That performance mirrors much of what has been happening at MSNBC in the week since Mr. Trump’s election win. MSNBC has averaged 550,000 viewers since Election Day, a 39 percent decline compared with the network’s average in October. In prime time, MSNBC’s audience has declined 53 percent, according to the Nielsen data.

Someone at the Normal Lear Center compared what liberal MSNBC viewers were experiencing to PTSD.

“In the wake of the result, people are probably turning to self-care,” said Martin Kaplan, who runs the Norman Lear Center at the University of Southern California. “It’s like post-traumatic stress disorder of some kind. You don’t want to go back to the scene of the explosion right away.”

I sort of doubt that MSNBC execs are talking about better representing the audience. They are fully committed to being resistance television and hoping their numbers will recover as Trump opposition finds its feet.

That said, Megyn Kelly has been arguing lately that it’s just a matter of time until Joy Reid is out of a job. According to Kelly, Reid and Elie Mystal are the most racist voices on television. She believes MSNBC is going to take this moment to cut its losses. Here’s Kelly making the case on her show.