‘The View’ Hosts Turn Up Their Noses at ‘Ridiculous’ NPR ‘Snitch Hotline’ for Non-Maskers

Sunny Hostin was the lone supporter of the idea on Friday

The View

The hosts of “The View” may wholeheartedly support and encourage people masking up in public areas, but that doesn’t mean they support snitching on those who don’t. In fact, on Friday’s show, the table mostly condemned NPR’s attempt to create what the women called a “snitch hotline.”

In a memo sent out on Thursday, NPR informed their employees that a tip line has been created for anyone who wants to express “anonymous concern” about co-workers who aren’t masking up in the office, as COVID cases begin to rise again. And for the most part, the hosts of “The View” were not fans of the idea.

“I would never do that,” Joy Behar said. “I’m Italian, we don’t snitch. We don’t snitch.”

Both Sara Haines and guest host Dan Abrams called the idea “ridiculous” as well, with Abrams arguing, “We’re at a different point in COVID now. We’re just not at the point we were two years ago.”

Haines took particular issue with “the snitching element” of the situation as a whole, saying that thanks to COVID, “we’ve lost our civility.”

“If someone out here had the mask down, I don’t think I’d come swingin’. I’d just say ‘Hey, excuse me, would you mind?’” Haines said. “Nobody talks like that to each other anymore. So we shouldn’t be surprised when we can’t talk about actually heavy topics.”

Sunny Hostin was the outlier at the table on this one, making a case for why she actually supports NPR’s hotline measure.

“I think it’s a good thing, because we’ve been terrible to each other during this pandemic,” Hostin said.

She made a similar point as Haines, arguing that people stopped being decent to each other in the battle over masks, with conversations even coming to blows in some places. For Hostin, this is a much safer way of confronting someone who might get physical otherwise.

“I just think you have this mechanism now where you can just call, and snitch, and protect yourself, as opposed to taking it on yourself,” she added.

But, at the end of the day, Haines couldn’t get past the idea of snitching. “They even call it like a ‘snitch hotline,’” she said (though nowhere in the NPR memo is it actually referred to explicitly as such). “We don’t need to be snitching on grown adults.”

In response, NPR noted that this hotline is “not something new set up specifically for this purpose.”

“We are still going through a pandemic and infection numbers have been rising around the country. NPR has strong safety protocols in place, including a masking requirement for onsite work. We want to ensure our onsite staff is able to safely work in our building and we take all our safety protocols seriously,” an NPR spokesperson said in a statement to TheWrap.

They continued: “We sent a memo yesterday to remind onsite staff of the protocols as well as staff who may be returning to the office now for the first time and may not be as familiar with them. We have signage around the building reminding people to wear masks but we also know colleagues may be uncomfortable reminding someone to put their mask back on if they’ve forgotten to do so after eating or being alone in an office or studio. We have different ways for concerns to be raised, including a portal that was set up years before COVID for staff to report workplace concerns. It’s not something new set up specifically for this purpose.”

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