A co-host of The View was cut off by her colleagues after she attempted to bring up Michael Bloomberg’s years-old defense of the stop-and-frisk policy that appeared in leaked audio this week.
“I think what’s interesting is that Bloomberg’s position within the African American community, he’s actually taking votes away from [Joe] Biden,” Sunny Hostin said on Wednesday’s show, noting that the former vice president will be a guest on Thursday. “There’s that newly released audio from 2015, an Aspen Institute speech when he was mayor — he was mayor of New York [City], I guess between 2002 and 2013. Again, he talks about this stop and frisk,” she added.
“Let’s talk about Bloomberg in the next segment,” Joy Behar said as fellow co-hosts Whoopi Goldberg and Meghan McCain cut in to say they would talk about it in the next segment.
Goldberg then handed Hostin a slip of paper and said, “Here’s the full thing.”
“Yeah, I’ve —,” Hostin responded before the show went to the break. The hosts did not discuss Bloomberg again for the rest of the show.
A representative for ABC told the Washington Examiner the hosts planned to discuss the topic, but ran out of time. “We planned to discuss but we ran out of time with the scheduled Janet Jackson surprise for our audience,” the representative said.
On Monday, the hosts touted Bloomberg’s candidacy for the Democratic presidential nomination and ignored the audio that was published earlier in the day. The former New York City mayor said in the 2015 audio that “95% of your murders” are minority males between 16 and 25 years old.
“And the way you get the guns out of the kids’ hands is to throw them up against the wall and frisk them. And then they start. ’Oh, I don’t want to get caught,’ so they don’t bring the gun. They still have a gun, but they leave it at home,” Bloomberg said in the audio.
He has apologized for promoting stop and frisk and for the comments he made in the audio. “I have apologized for taking too long to understand the impact of stop and frisk on Black and Latino communities. I inherited stop and frisk. In an effort to stop gun violence, it was overused. I cut it back by 95%. I should have cut it back sooner,” he said in a tweet on Tuesday.
