Meghan McCain Scolds Her ‘View’ Co-Hosts For Celebrating Misreported Flynn News

Meghan McCain took her opportunity on Monday’s episode of The View to criticize her co-hosts — specifically Joy Behar — and The View‘s studio audience on Friday for their reaction to a hastily passed-along news report regarding Michael Flynn. The report from ABC’s Brian Ross, which was later retracted, stated that Flynn was set to testify that Donald Trump directed him to make contact with Russian officials while Trump was still a Presidential candidate. Ross later clarified that it was “shortly after the election that President-elect Trump directed Flynn to contact Russian officials.”

The erroneous report was passed to Joy Behar in the middle of Friday’s episode as breaking news, and when Behar read that Flynn would be testifying that Trump instructed him to breach national security, Behar’s face lit up and the studio audience applauded wildly. After Brian Ross’s retraction — and subsequent suspension by ABC — the conservative McCain made sure that her discomfort with Friday’s display was clear.

“When it happened in real time, I think everyone who was watching the show could see my discomfort at the room erupting like the Dodgers had just won the World Series,” McCain said. “If we’re celebrating a breach of national security, something so egregious that it’s going to tear our country apart.”

McCain compared the audience’s cheering over the report of Trump committing impeachable offenses to Rush Limbaugh famously saying he hoped for Barack Obama to fail as president.

McCain then went on to dub Ross’s report “fake news” and lamented the fact that she has to attend parties wither conservative friends and defend The View for putting out “fake news” that — McCain stressed this twice — negatively affected the stock market. McCain used the term “fake news” six times in under two minutes, before Behar corrected her that “fake news” is a specific term that refers to the intentional spreading of knowingly false information in order to influence things like elections, the best example of which being false reports spread around on Facebook in the run-up to the 2016 election. In the months since Donald Trump’s election, the Trump administration has taken to misapplying that term to refer to any news reports they believe are anti-Trump and/or false.

“Fake news,” said guest co-host and conservative panelist Ana Navarro, “is a catch phrase that Trump is trying to use against real news that is inconvenient for him.”

McCain is the conservative daughter of Senator John McCain, and was named new co-host of The View on October 9th.

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