Watching The View last week felt like watching the media take a victory lap before the facts were in, when co-host Sunny Hostin casually admitted she “doesn’t know anything about it” and then rushed to pronounce war crimes. That’s the modern pattern: authority-free conjecture dressed up as moral certainty, delivered to millions who trust network anchors to at least get the basics right.
The actual controversy at the center of the hysteria is grave: multiple outlets reported that a U.S. strike on a suspected drug-smuggling boat in September resulted in a follow-up hit that killed two survivors, and one high-profile report quoted a purported order to “kill them all.” Those are explosive allegations that deserve scrutiny, not cable TV show trials.
Even here the story is not as tidy as the left-wing outrage machine wants it to be — military leaders briefed Congress and an admiral told lawmakers there was no explicit “kill them all” order, a detail that undercuts the simplistic take the network pundits peddled. Republicans and Democrats in Congress alike are demanding answers, which is exactly how this should work if the media weren’t so busy rendering verdicts on camera.
President Trump and the Pentagon have defended the broader operations as part of a hard-line push against transnational narco-terror networks, and lawmakers are pressing for release of unedited footage so the American people can see what actually happened. That demand for transparency is right — if the administration can show clear, lawful bases for the strikes, the hysteria collapses; if it cannot, accountability must follow.
So why did The View’s hosts leap from ignorance to condemnation? Because anger is a cheap currency and audiences on the left reward theatrical moralism more than careful analysis. Their “flat out murder” headlines and sanctimonious outrage ignore that confronting cartels and protecting American lives is messy, dangerous, and often misrepresented by people who have never faced an enemy at sea.
Conservatives should demand two things at once: a full, unredacted release of the evidence and a refusal to let cable-TV grandstanding substitute for due process. The nation can both stand with our troops when they lawfully confront real threats and insist on accountability if wrong decisions were made — that’s called patriotism, not partisanship.
At the end of the day, hardworking Americans deserve sober reporting and serious oversight, not performative moral outrage from celebrity hosts who admit on air they don’t know the law. Push your representatives to get the truth, insist on the footage, and don’t let the Washington media-industrial complex railroad our country with headlines before the facts are on the table.
