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.”