The co-hosts of ABC’s “The View” are joining the ranks of those questioning a reporter’s decision to share that Pennsylvania Senate candidate John Fetterman (D) struggled to understand small talk.
During a segment on Thursday, co-host Sara Haines noted, “The auditory processing doesn’t matter if it’s a short sentence or a long sentence, simple words or complex words. It’s an auditory processing problem.”
“So unless she was speaking small talk in closed captions, he was not going to understand. That’s the issue,” she added.
Sunny Hostin chimed in to suggest it was “inappropriate” for NBC’s Dasha Burns to mention the Senate hopeful’s struggle to understand the small talk after his stroke.
That led Whoopi Goldberg to interject, “Maybe she’s bad at small talk. Maybe it was her.”
Other journalists have criticized Burns for her comment as they explained they did not have a similar experience with Fetterman.
“Maybe it’s her,” Hostin seemed to agree as she suggested it was odd to bring up small talk.
She added, “I don’t know about everybody else, but I love closed caption. I watch all my series [with] closed caption because I can’t sometimes understand the accents that people are using. And I don’t understand things. And it’s very helpful in terms of processing. And I don’t have a cognitive disorder.”
There is a little bit of a difference between using closed captions to understand a TV show with music and bad sound mixing, and using closed captions to understand when someone is in the room speaking to you face-to-face.
Watch the video below:
Sunny Hostin says it was "inappropriate" for NBC reporter Dasha Burns to bring up Fetterman having trouble understanding their "small talk" before the interview.
— Washington Free Beacon (@FreeBeacon) October 13, 2022
Whoopi: "Maybe she’s bad at small talk, maybe it was her!"
Sunny: "Maybe it’s her." pic.twitter.com/yavdoP5kih
It is not unfair or inappropriate for people to know about the conditions of someone running for office — unless the conversation between Burns and Fetterman was supposed to be off the record. But there is no indication that is the case.
Haines seems to have a valid point that it does not matter whether someone is using a short or a long sentence. If there is an auditory processing issue, someone can struggle to understand dialogue regardless.
But to assert that Fetterman had trouble understanding the conversation because the reporter is bad at small talk is a little ridiculous.
And it seems more like a way to simply brush away concerns.
The job of a senator requires listening to and participating in debates — at least in theory. And Fetterman may not always have the ability to use closed captioning.
So if he cannot understand what someone is saying to him without closed captioning, that is something voters should know.