Entertainment shows are usually a safe haven for presidential hopefuls – a place to guffaw, dance and otherwise escape the hard questioning and fact-checking of the news media.
That’s not exactly how it went for Republican Carly Fiorina on ABC’s “The View” on Friday.
Fiorina got major pushback from the show’s all-female cast when, responding to a question about how she can be both pro-women and anti-abortion rights, she said that “whether you’re pro-choice or pro-life, the majority of Americans are horrified by the reality that we’re harvesting baby parts through late-term abortions.”
Co-host Whoopi Goldberg cut her off: “Carly, I need to stop you. I need to stop you because that is not – you know that’s not true.”
Fiorina came back with an assertion that “Planned Parenthood just announced they were no longer going to take compensation for that.”
That statement got Joy Behar riled up: “Please don’t say things like that, that are not true. That offends my sensibility to hear you say something like that when you know it’s not true.”
The testy exchange was a far cry from the friendly repartee of Fiorina’s appearance on “The View” in June, which included her declaration that “I’ve been a Whoopi groupie for, like, 20 years.”
It was an especially notable feud, given the show’s hosts just last week faced criticism for labeling Fiorina’s expression during a debate “demented” and saying she would make a good Halloween mask.
But if Fiorina thought she’d get the TV equivalent of a makeup call, she was wrong.
Goldberg kicked off Friday’s interview with an offer to “clear the air,” to which Fiorina replied that “I have skin plenty thick enough to take whatever people throw at me.” Then they got into the abortion thing.
So what’s the backstory here?
Well, Planned Parenthood President Cecile Richards wrote in an August letter to Congress that a small number of affiliated clinics do supply aborted fetal tissue to medical researchers with the consent of expectant women. Some affiliates, she added, receive payments of $45 to $60 per specimen to “recover only their costs, as allowed under the federal law and our guidance.”
And last month, Planned Parenthood said it would stop accepting reimbursement for the cost of supplying fetal tissue.
Goldberg and Behar might have been ready to pounce because of previous statements Fiorina has made about Planned Parenthood and fetal tissue, which were marred by inaccuracies. In the second primary debate, for instance, she described a graphic undercover video that she said showed “a fully formed fetus on the table, its heart beating, its legs kicking while someone says, ‘We have to keep it alive to harvest its brain.’”
Such a scene is not part of the video, though it was recounted in an on-camera interview by a medical worker who claimed to have witnessed it. And other parts of the video are pretty gruesome.
In any case, the lesson here for candidates may be that there’s no such thing as a media refuge. Whether the interviewer is Wolf or Whoopi, they better be ready for tough questions.
