Melissa Joskow / Media Matters
Update (8/9): Mediaite is reporting that Huntsman is officially leaving Fox News to co-host The View.
On July 23, HuffPost reported that Fox News’ Abby Huntsman, currently a co-host of Fox & Friends Weekend, is in talks with ABC to join the network’s daytime talk show The View, a favorite target of right-wing media. In response, a Fox News source told HuffPost that the agency that represents Huntsman “is actually in breach of the contract and is not even in the appropriate time window to shop Abby to another network.”
During her time at Fox News, Huntsman has accumulated a record of incendiary conservative commentary. She has helped shill for Trump, including defending his racist views and repeated lies; pushed racist views and falsehoods of her own; and attacked the media. Here are some of Huntsman’s comments and actions:
Backing often-misleading right-wing media narratives
On race
- During a segment in which two Black Fox News contributors were driven to tears by President Donald Trump’s comments that there were “some very fine people” on both sides after the violent 2017 white supremacist rally in Charlottesville, VA, Huntsman spent most of the time defending Trump’s statement.
- Huntsman accused some journalists of rushing to blame “white Christians” for the Charlottesville rally and attack.
- Huntsman parroted a guest’s baseless comments that linked former NFL player Colin Kaepernick’s protests against police violence with killings of police officers.
- After Trump disinvited the Super Bowl champion Philadelphia Eagles from the White House following reports that almost all players and coaches were planning on boycotting the visit, Huntsman attacked the NFL team, suggesting they were unpatriotic even though no player on the Eagles roster knelt or sat during the championship season.
- Huntsman also criticized NFL players for protesting police brutality by kneeling during the anthem instead of attempting to engage in a constructive dialogue with Trump, a known racist who has demonstrated a lack of good faith on the topic by misconstruing the purpose of the protests.
On ICE and immigration
- When a guest host said Americans oppose Trump’s family separation policy, Huntsman replied, “Don’t blame ICE, blame the lawmakers,” referring to Immigration and Customs Enforcement. Family separation is entirely Trump’s policy.
- Huntsman excused ICE’s vile human rights abuses with the claim that “they are just doing their job, they are just doing what they are told to do” -- a line of reasoning also known as the Nuremberg defense.
- Huntsman hosted a misleading Fox segment, which Trump retweeted, about the “serious threat for homegrown terror” from “cold-blooded terrorists” holding R-1 visas.
- Huntsman falsely claimed that the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program is unconstitutional.
Shilling for Trump
- Huntsman started a bizarre, false rumor on Twitter that the 2016 presidential campaign of Wisconsin Republican Gov. Scott Walker began with chants of “we want Trump.” She later deleted the tweet and apologized.
- Huntsman pushed key (and often false) pro-Trump narratives at vital times, including saying that the leak of Trump’s 2005 tax return is why “good people” don’t run for office and claiming that a stolen email showed Hillary Clinton monetizing her position as secretary of state (the email was written two years after Clinton vacated the office).
- Huntsman criticized the press in an attempt to defend Trump’s remarks that then-President Barack Obama was a founder of ISIS, and she complained that the media did not attack Clinton or Obama for saying Trump’s rhetoric helps ISIS recruit people. But national security experts have said that Trump’s words actually did help ISIS.
- After unprecedented outrage forced Trump to finally condemn the neo-Nazis at the Charlottesville rally, Huntsman complained that the president’s forced statement would “still be criticized” and “still be politicized” instead of being taken at face value.
- Huntsman called Trump’s 2017 multinational trip “as presidential … as we have seen him” despite Trump’s numerous gaffes, including shoving a prime minister out of his way, leaving a tone-deaf message in a Holocaust memorial visitors book, and canceling an Israeli event after he wasn’t allowed to land Marine One on top of an ancient landmark for fear that doing so would damage it.
- Huntsman suggested that reporting on Trump’s disastrous phone calls with Mexican and Australian leadership put “national security and [the] safety of the American people in the world” at risk.
- Huntsman interviewed then-newly appointed U.S. Ambassador to Russia Jon Huntsman, who is also her father, and failed to ask him about Russian election interference.
- Huntsman praised White House press secretary Sarah Sanders for handling criticism -- including being denied service at a restaurant -- “with class.” Sanders had used her government Twitter account to call out the restaurant by name, prompting a wave of death threats, many directed at an unrelated business.
Backing often-misleading right-wing media narratives
- Huntsman claimed that Fox News “definitely do[es] treat women well” by giving her and others “opportunities to reach our full potential.”
- Huntsman baselessly reported that “$70 million of taxpayer money was wasted on food-stamp fraud” in 2016; she later apologized for the report.
- Huntsman defended Trump's conspiracy theory of rampant voter fraud in the 2016 election by claiming that a North Carolina statewide audit showed that “some irregular voting did occur.” While Huntsman’s claim is true, she failed to mention that the audit concluded that most of these were honest mistakes and that “the state’s elections are sound and virtually fraud-free.”
- Huntsman endorsed the idea of drafting 16-year-old children into the military so they can “learn respect [and] learn how to be a good citizen.”