9 Biggest ‘The View’ Controversies Ever

With its daily discussion of “Hot Topics” and panelists from opposing political parties, the conversation on The View is often tense. Lately, however, the conversation around the ABC show become the subject of tension, as the Federal Communications Commission reportedly has the daytime talk show under investigation.

That development, if true, is just the latest problem The View has faced, as you’ll see below. Here’s a timeline of the show’s biggest controversies, up to and including its targeting by Donald Trump’s administration.

2006: Star Jones exits The View amid conflict with Barbara Walters

After original cohost Star Jones was let go from The View, she jumped the gun and announced her exit days ahead of schedule in June 2006, cohost and executive producer Barbara Walters later told the Associated Press. Walters, who claimed audience favor had turned against Jones, said her colleague’s on-air announcement blindsided her, asserting, “I love Star, and I was trying to do everything I possibly could — up until this morning when I was betrayed — to protect her.”

Related

'The View,' Other Late-Night Shows to Be Affected by FCC's New Guidance

Walters and Jones clashed again in May 2008 after the former claimed in an interview on The Oprah Winfrey Show that the hosts of The View kept Jones’ gastric-bypass surgery a secret on Jones’ say-so.

“It is a sad day when an icon like Barbara Walters, in the sunset of her life, is reduced to … speaking negatively against me all for the sake of selling a book,” Jones told Us Weekly, per ABC News.

2006: Rosie O’Donnell speaks in mock Chinese

Cohost Rosie O’Donnell caught flak — and complaints from the 10,000-strong UNITY: Journalists of Color organization and New York City councilman John C. Liu — by repeatedly saying “ching chong” in an apparent attempt to mimic the Chinese language in December 2006 discussion on The View, per People.

About a week later, O’Donnell apologized. “This apparently was very offensive to a lot of Asian people. So I asked Judy, who’s Asian and works here in our hair and makeup department. I said, ‘Was it offensive to you?’ And she said, ‘Well, kinda. When I was a kid, people did tease me by saying ching-chong.’ … So apparently ‘ching-chong,’ unbeknownst to me, is a very offensive way to make fun, quote-unquote, or mock, Asian accents. Some people have told me it’s as bad as the N-word. … I never intended to hurt anyone, and I’m sorry for those people who felt hurt or were teased on the playground.”

2007: O’Donnell leaves the show after on-air argument with Elisabeth Hasselbeck

In August 2007, O’Donnell and Elisabeth Hasselbeck had a vicious debate on The View after O’Donnell spurred backlash by saying, “655,000 Iraqi civilians have died. Who are the terrorists?” During their argument, O’Donnell accused her cohost of not vouching for O’Donnell’s viewpoint that it’s not the U.S. troops who were the terrorists in that equation.

Following that episode, O’Donnell quit the show, though she returned for another season in 2014. And she reflected on her Hasselbeck feud just last year. “Here she was coming at me on national TV about whether or not I was patriotic,” O’Donnell said on the Australian radio show Ricki-Lee, Tim & Joel. “It felt to me like I was on a basketball team of five women, and one of them kept tripping me on my way to the hoop.”

2013: The View hires Jenny McCarthy

Walters announced in July 2013 that Jenny McCarthy would join The View as a cohost that fall. But the comedian’s well-documented skepticism about the safety of vaccines had onlookers worried. Bill Nye, for example, wrote in an email to The Huffington Post he was concerned McCarthy would use her new platform to encourage their parents not to vaccinate their kids. “We must all keep in mind that regulations requiring vaccinations are not only created to protect a kid from extant germs; vaccinations also protect my kid from yours,” he explained.

Salon’s Alex Pareene said, “It’s incredibly irresponsible for a broadcast television network to think Jenny McCarthy should be on television — in a position where her job is to share her opinions — every day.” And The New Yorker’s Michael Specter wrote, “McCarthy, who is savvy, telegenic, and pulchritudinous, is also the person most visibly associated with the deadly and authoritatively discredited anti-vaccine movement in the United States.”

2015: #NursesUnite against The View

The advertisers Johnson & Johnson, Eggland’s Best, Party City, Snuggle, and McCormick & Company all severed ties with The View in September 2015 — and nurses popularized the hashtag #NursesUnite on social media — after the hosts of The View made fun of Miss Colorado Kelley Johnson’s Miss America monologue about caring for a patient with Alzheimer’s, per the Daily News.

“She came out in a nurse’s uniform and basically read her emails out loud and, shockingly, did not win,” Michelle Collins said on The View. “I swear to God, it was hilarious.”

“Why does she have a doctor’s stethoscope on?” cohost Joy Behar added, seeming unaware that nurses use stethoscopes, too.

2018: Joy Behar offends Christians with comments about Mike Pence

On The View in February 2018, the hosts discussed comments former White House staffer Omarosa Manigault made about then-Vice President Mike Pence on Celebrity Big Brother. On that reality show, Manigault said Pence thought Jesus told him what to say.

“It’s one thing to talk to Jesus. It’s another thing when Jesus talks to you,” Joy Behar quipped in response on The View. “That’s called mental illness, if I’m not correct, hearing voices.”

Afterward, the conservative Media Research Center organization accused the show of promoting “anti-Christian bigotry,” and urged followers to take action, inspiring protesters to place 40,000 phone calls to ABC and 6,000 calls to The View’s advertisers, according to The Washington Post. Behar apologized on air the following month, saying she “was raised to respect everyone’s religious faith” and “fell short of that.”

2022: Whoopi Goldberg offends viewers with Holocaust remarks

ABC suspended cohost Whoopi Goldberg from The View for two weeks amid widespread backlash — including complaints from the Anti-Defamation League and the U.S. Holocaust Museum — over the remarks she made in a January 2022 discussion about the Holocaust. “Let’s be truthful about it because [the] Holocaust isn’t about race,” Goldberg said as she and the other stars of The View discussed a Tennessee school board’s ban of the Art Spiegelman graphic novel Maus, per Variety. “It’s not about race. It’s about man’s inhumanity to man.”

The following day — her last day on air before her suspension — Goldberg apologized. “It is indeed about race, because Hitler and the Nazis considered the Jews to be an inferior race,” she said. “Now, words matter, and mine are no exception. I regret my comments, as I said, and I stand corrected.”

2022: The View hosts suggest neo-Nazis joined the Turning Point USA summit

In a July 2022 episode, the women of The View discussed a Turning Point USA summit in Tampa, Florida, outside of which neo-Nazis gathered. “You let them in, and you knew what they were, so you are complicit,” Goldberg said during that episode, per Deadline.

Days later, cohost Sara Haines apologized on behalf of the show. “We want to make clear that these demonstrators were gathered outside the event and that they were not invited or endorsed by Turning Point USA,” she said, in part. “So we apologize for anything we said that may have been unclear on these points.”

But one apology didn’t suffice, apparently, because Goldberg offered another mea culpa a day later. “I put the young people at the conference in the same category as the protesters outside, and I don’t like it when people make assumptions about me, and it’s not any better when I make assumptions about other people, which I did,” she said. “So my bad. I’m sorry.”

2025: FCC reportedly investigates The View over alleged violation of equal time rules

In a podcast interview in September 2025, the Trump-appointed Federal Communications Commission Chair Brendan Carr said it would be “worthwhile” to see whether The View and other shows “still qualify as bona fide news programs and therefore are exempt from the equal opportunity regime that Congress has put in place,” per Politico.

Then this month came a Reuters report that the FCC was indeed investigating whether The Viewran afoul of equal-time rules after the program hosted a Democratic Texas Senate candidate.

Anna M. Gomez, an FCC commissioner, denounced the reported investigation in a press release. “Let’s be clear on what this is. This is government intimidation, not a legitimate investigation,” Gomez declared. “Like many other so-called ‘investigations’ before it, the FCC will announce an investigation but never carry one out, reach a conclusion, or take any meaningful action. The real purpose is to weaponize the FCC’s regulatory authority to intimidate perceived critics of this Administration and chill protected speech. That is not how a free society operates.”

The View, weekdays, 11a/10c, ABC

More Headlines:

• 9 Biggest ‘The View’ Controversies Ever
• Sheriff in Nancy Guthrie Disappearance Says Search Could Take ‘Weeks or Months or Years’
• Daytime TV Performer of the Week: ‘Y&R’s Ethan Ray Clark Shines as Kidnapped Dominic Is Rescued
• ‘America’s Next Top Model’ Host Tyra Banks Reveals She’s Planning Cycle 25
• 2026 Olympics TV Schedule Week 3: How to Watch Every Event at the Winter Games