ABC News urged 'View' co-host Hostin to cut passages from book that put network in 'bad light': Report
'Deleting those passages didn't feel right to me,' Hostin writes in a foreword to her forthcoming memoir
{{#rendered}} {{/rendered}}ABC News tried and failed to have "The View" co-host Sunny Hostin remove passages from her forthcoming book that reflected poorly on the Disney-owned network, according to a report published Thursday.
Journalist Yashar Ali, who obtained a copy of Hostin's book "I Am These Truths: A Memoir of Identity, Justice, and Living Between Worlds," reported that Hostin includes a foreword in which she reveals the attempted edits.
“Deleting those passages didn’t feel right to me — they were all true, and they were some of the battle scars of my experience," Hostin reportedly wrote. "My television agent and my book agent emailed me to express confusion that a news organization would try to censor a Puerto Rican, African American woman’s story while they were covering global demonstrations demanding racial equity.”
{{#rendered}} {{/rendered}}Hostin, who also serves as a correspondent and legal analyst for the network, reportedly writes that the network relented after her attorneys got involved. According to Ali, Hostin does not give specifics of what ABC News wanted excised.
Sunny Hostin has been a co-host of 'The View' since September 2016. (Photo by Jenny Anderson/Walt Disney Television via Getty Images)
“I didn’t want to believe that racism played a part in their revision requests — we were just dotting some i’s and crossing some t’s, right? Then, on Friday, June 12th, I got a text from a reporter," Hostin writes.
{{#rendered}} {{/rendered}}Ali acknowledged that he was the "reporter" who had reached out to Hostin while reporting on allegations of racism by top ABC News executive Barbara Fedida, who was later fired.
"I don’t have a relationship with Hostin — she politely thanked me for giving her a heads up and didn’t say much else — so outside of her public comments, I never knew how she felt about my reporting," Ali wrote Thursday.
Fedida had reportedly referred to Hostin as "low-rent."
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"Many of the experiences I’ve had at ABC, including several described in these pages that standards and practices at first asked me to delete — well, if the allegations were true, all of the dots were connected," Hostin writes. "My suspicions that I was treated worse than my white [sic] colleagues — the fears that I tried to talk myself out of many times — maybe they were true.
"Had my employer, my home away from home, devalued, dismissed, and underpaid me because of my race? I had just read emails from them directing me to erase evidence of such treatment from my story. And if I'm being honest, I wasn't even angry. I was deeply, profoundly shaken and saddened.”
{{#rendered}} {{/rendered}}Neither ABC News nor representatives of Hostin immediately responded to Fox News' requests for comment.
Sunny Hostin previously said she was “really disappointed and saddened” by now-departed ABC News executive Barbara Fedida's racist comments.
Fedida was put on administrative leave in June after Ali reported that the then-head of ABC News talent made disparaging remarks about Hostin and other prominent Black personalities, including "Good Morning America" anchor Robin Roberts and then-ABC News journalist Kendis Gibson."
In 2018, during a contentious meeting about renewing Roberts's contract, Fedida reportedly "asked what more Roberts could want and said it wasn’t as if the network was asking Roberts to 'pick cotton.'"
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She also allegedly said of Gibson that ABC “spends more on toilet paper than we ever would on him."
After an investigation into the claims made against her, Fedida was fired in July.