On the March 10, 2026, episode of the show, co-host Whoopi Goldberg said out loud, on national TV, that that military actions against Iran were intended to act as a distraction from news developments, specifically mentioning the Jeffrey Epstein files and…are you ready? Wait for it…the endless search for Nancy Guthrie, the mother of Today Show co-host Savannah Guthrie.
The claim that President Trump is somehow terrified over imaginary evidence that he engaged in some kind of criminal activity with the sex-trafficking billionaire is one of the Trump Deranged Left’s most desperate Big Lies, so Whoopie wasn’t even being original with that crackpot claim. But Goldberg really and truly—I wouldn’t lie to you now, I’m an ethicist!—expressed the belief that the military strikes in Iran were a “method of distraction” to shift public attention away from the investigation into the disappearance of Nancy Guthrie, who went missing in Arizona on February 1, 2026!
The fact that the news media incompetently, irresponsibly and inexplicably elevated the disappearance of one elderly white woman to round-the-clock bulletin status purely because of her relationship to a minor celebrity was, as I have noted here before, a new low for American journalism priorities. Why in the Milky Way, however, would Donald Trump, or anyone, want to actively shift attention away from a story with no impact on the nation or the public welfare at all, and want to do so so desperately that they would start a war? And how could Whoopi Goldberg, or anyone, come to the crack-brained conclusion that the President was so dedicated to ignoring Savannah’s Guthrie’s mom unless they were several fries short of a Happy Meal?
They couldn’t. Whoopi’s statement proves beyond a shadow of a doubt that, as Clarence Darrow said about thrill killers Leopold and Loeb, “somewhere in the infinite processes that go to the making up” of her mind and character “something slipped.” In their case, what slipped made them psychopaths, though brilliant ones. In Whoopi’s case, what slipped left her dumb as a pet rock after a lobotomy.
People who are that dumb are not trustworthy. As such, they should not be permitted to be clergy, doctors, lawyers, judges, law enforcement officials, military leaders, public servants, accountants, psychiatrists, and teachers, and, if they somehow slip through a crack to acquire such a job, they should be kicked out of the profession once their extreme degree of stupidity is demonstrated beyond a reasonable doubt, beyond objective disagreement, beyond mere opinion or good faith disagreement. This is for the public good, and I cannot imagine what the ethical argument would be to oppose preventing drooling idiots from holding professional positions.
News commentators, for better or worse, are currently regarded as professionals. A woman who states with a straight face that the President of the United States started a war to keep the American people from hearing the latest progress on finding an 84-year-old woman who has been missing for over a month is unfit to be one. If ABC can’t figure that out, then a regulatory authority should step in.
Ethics Alarms 
Jack, I get where you’re coming from here. Truly. But I really can’t agree, in the most part.
Goldberg was entertaining as a comedienne long ago; she was compelling as an actress in The Color Purple and especially in her role as the wise old soul Guinan in Star Trek: The Next Generation. Anyone who has read your work as long as I have knows of your respect for talent – and your understanding that talent onstage or camera doesn’t confer expertise elsewhere. Goldberg is Exhibit A. Respect the work, but don’t assign stage presence as skill anywhere else.
Hostin is glib, gorgeous, and black. That’s a trifecta these days, and she gets extra boosts from regular appearances elsewhere, not limited to The Food Network, where Bobby Flay seems entranced. She does appear to know a thing or two about good cooking. But none of this makes her a shoe-in for a SCOTUS appointment, failing another drooling and deranged Joe Biden.
The problem with your argument is simply one of practicality colliding with free-market concepts. It’s well established that bar associations are more or less useless when it comes to policing lawyers. It’s increasingly obvious that medical associations can’t control MDs. Peer review doesn’t control academic papers. And so on. We don’t even need to mention ethics watchdogs in news media. Or maybe we do.
Each “professional” field has at least one professional oversight body, to say nothing of state licesnsure requirements. And most have been co-opted and proven as failures. Personally, despite those failures, I am NOT ready to assign governments with the responsibility to do any of these things. They’ve proven they can’t even figure out what’s going on, let alone what to do about it.
What I fear far more than Sunny Hostin is an ideological mindset completely different from ours, based on the premise that anyone who doesn’t accept it deserves to be eliminated. That’s a far bigger threat than anything said by the morons on The View. It’s a bigger threat than socialism/communism. And I have no clue how to deal with it while maintaining the concepts enshrined in the Constitution. It may, in fact, be impossible – but as an optimist by nature, I’m willing to consider an argument that threads the needle.
For once, I find myself disagreeing with The Who. “Hope I Die Before I Get Old” was a rallying cry when I was in my teens. Nowadays, I’m more and more thinking “Hope I Die Before It All Completely Falls to Shit.”
But journalists have no oversight body, no discipline, no agreed-upon ethics standards, nothing. Yet they claim special privileges under the Times v Sullivan and the Bill of Rights. I agree that the other professions’ discipline and oversight is more illusory than real, but its something. If there are no qualifications—Whoopi has none—then there should at least be minimal standards. If Rudi Giuliani can be disbarred under a politicized system, and he was, I see the potential politicizing of journalism professional standards as a threat that shouldn’t allow the perfect to be the enemy of the good. Untrustworthy journalists are at least as dangerous to the public welfare as unethical lawyers. So give journalists a choice: submit to minimal standards of competence, or officially agree that it is no profession, and is no more trustworthy than shell game hustlers.
These hate mongers have no problem alleging that the President is senile, completely ignoring their own struggles with mental acuity. To whit … they are all morons!
I tried giving Whoopi the benefit of the doubt, that she she botched an ad-libbed statement comparing using the Iran war as a distraction similar, similar to Trump using obsessive FBI resources in the Guthrie case as a distraction. It would still be a dumb comparison, but at least a coherent statement.
But then I watched the clip (why oh why do you make me watch the View!), and she was very clearly using it as an example of the news stories Trump was purportedly burying with the Iran war. It was stunningly dumb.
But worse was the affirmative reaction to Whoopi’s statement. Another woman on the panel emphatically shouted, “Yeah!” as Whoopi asked, “Why haven’t we heard about about Gunthrie?” The audience hooted and hollered.
This is a mob mentality.
This is a mob mentality.
Too kind.
As comforting as I personally would find it to make people prove they have strong foundational reasoning skills before allowing them to take consequential actions like voting, becoming parents, or holding positions of decision-making responsibility, there are currently a few major issues with that system that would need to be addressed.
First, there’s the danger of people corrupting the system to remove power from those who might deserve it, thereby giving themselves and their affiliates disproportionate power.
Second, there’s currently not enough consensus on what constitutes relevant reasoning faculties. That’s because of point three.
Third, many if not most people are reasonably competent in some contexts but have blind spots in others. For example, they might be good at understanding diplomacy but have a weak grasp of economics, or vice versa.
I’d like to create a society where most people don’t have any serious blind spots, but in the meantime disenfranchising people for having fundamental misconceptions about entire aspects of reality would disqualify most of the people who keep the world’s systems operational, and we don’t have nearly enough people prepared to step up and take on those roles.
That’s why my plan is to demonstrate how sound reasoning works from the ground up, starting with early adopters and working our way outward. It’s much more efficient, effective, robust, and feasible than finding every significant ignorance in every influential figure and forcing them to be educated or to step down.