ABC’s “The View” addressed Kate Middleton’s cancer announcement during Monday’s show and expressed regret over their lighthearted joking and speculation about where she has been in recent weeks.
Co-hosts of “The View” discussed their coverage of Middleton and reflected on mistakes they made after it came out Friday that the Princess of Wales is battling cancer.
Co-host Whoopi Goldberg, who didn’t weigh in on the speculation at the time and had advised her co-hosts to stop the theorizing and give the British royal family privacy, asked fellow co-host Alyssa Farah Griffin how she felt now that she knew the truth about why the princess had been out of the public eye.
“I felt awful to be honest, Whoopi was right,” Griffin said. “I’m guilty of having gotten into the fun of ‘Where’s Kate?’ and sort of thinking it’s funny and sharing the memes and playing into that. I forgot something fundamental that we all know, which is every person, whether they’re a princess, somebody in a high privileged position, or just the person next to you, is dealing with personal struggles that we don’t know about.”
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“I send my love to her and strength to her because, sure, the palace totally mishandled the PR of this, but the public mishandled it,” she added. “We didn’t give her an ounce of – not we, you [Whoopi] did, a lot of other people did. I didn’t think about, there’s something more serious here that she’s dealing with, and I feel awful over it. It’s just a reminder, because all of us being, to a lesser degree, but in the public eye, we see the cruelty and casual meanness. I think as a society, we’re so quick to jump to that and to join the bandwagon and think it’s fun and forget these are actual human beings who are going through something.”
Co-host Ana Navarro described it as a “learning moment” and “teachable moment.”
“The lesson I learned was, when Whoopi Goldberg tells me to mind my own damn business, I will mind my own damn business, from now on,” Navarro said, praising Goldberg for taking a more understanding approach to Middleton’s mysterious absence from public life.
“I barely ever know what’s going on in pop culture, so it was very strange for me, Joy, too, to fall down this rabbit hole. But it was everywhere, right?” she said. “There was an international frenzy, you couldn’t avoid it. It was actually in reputable news outlets, not just the tabloids. It was in the New York Times, it was on CNN.”
“It was everywhere and, yeah, I fell down it because I think that that altered photo opened up a can of worms,” she added. “We’ve all learned there’s a bunch of internet sleuths out there who can notice every little thing and come up with conspiracy theories. I feel bad that I fell down the rabbit hole, fell down the speculation.”
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Navarro added that Middleton is well respected and valued in England, serving as “a bright spot in what has been a very dysfunctional royal family for decades and decades.”
Co-host Sunny Hostin jokingly said she was “deeply remorseful” that she allowed co-hosts Sara Haines and Griffin to drag her into the conspiracies because she generally doesn’t care that much about the royals.
“Because I went down this crazy rabbit hole, thank you to my co-hosts and to myself, I have to take blame for that because I also didn’t listen to Whoopi Goldberg who told me to stop, and I didn’t and so here I am,” Hostin said.
Goldberg warned that “once you’ve had this experience, it can scar you. “
“If I think that there is an edge, I’ll always say, ‘Listen, please, think about this,’” she said. “Because what you don’t know is what we say here doesn’t stay here, it goes across the pond, it goes on the internet and people, as you know, manipulate stuff.”
“I don’t want people to misunderstand you all,” she added. “I don’t want them thinking that you’re making fun of somebody because they’re ill. Because that’s what folks will say, but that was never the intention and so I always hope if I hear something, that I can help make us better.”
