"The View" hosts criticized NBC reporter Dasha Burns on Thursday for saying Democratic Senate candidate John Fetterman had difficulty with small talk prior to their interview.
Co-host Sunny Hostin said it was "inappropriate" to bring up "small talk" before the interview. Whoopi Goldberg suggested Burns might be "bad at small talk."
"Maybe it was her," Goldberg said.
"Maybe it’s her," Hostin agreed. "I don’t know if it was an off the record – if the interview was off the record. But I know, Sara, you've interviewed people. We’ve interviewed people and we have small talk before. That is generally not something that you mention when you are being interviewed by an anchor."
PITTSBURGH POST-GAZETTE: FETTERMAN'S ABILITY TO SERVE AS SENATOR IN QUESTION AMID HEALTH CONCERNS
Hostin continued to say that she didn't think Burns was a "neurosurgeon, or a neurologist" and read a statement from CNN's Sanjay Gupta.
"If someone were deaf or blind, they would understand they have an issue with hearing or seeing. People aren’t understanding the processing part. When she said that thing about how he didn’t necessarily understand her in small talk, the auditory processing doesn’t matter if it’s a short sentence or long sentence, simple words or complex words, it’s an auditory processing problem. So unless she was speaking in small words in closed captions, he was not going to understand. That's the issue," co-host Sara Haines said earlier in the segment.
Alyssa Farah Griffin argued that transparency was important and Hostin said that they never got former President Donald Trump's "full medical records."
Co-host Joy Behar said Democrats needed to get behind Fetterman because his Republican opponent, Mehmet Oz, is a "loser."
"I just want to – I just wanted to add on the Fetterman conversation, what makes the Republicans think that Herschel Walker is coherent and he hasn’t had a stroke?" Behar said at the start of the second segment.
Burns told MSNBC on Tuesday, while previewing her interview with Fetterman, that they had a monitor set up so that he could read the questions.
"I’ll say that just in some of the small talk prior to the interview, before the closed captioning was up and running, it did seem that he had a hard time understanding our conversations," she said.
Liberals were quick to criticize Burns and defend Fetterman. Several journalists said they had a different experience with Fetterman, including podcast host Molly Jong-Fast.
"I interviewed @JohnFetterman here, he understood everything I was saying and he was funny," she tweeted.
CLICK HERE TO GET THE FOX NEWS APP
NBC's Savannah Guthrie pressed Burns about journalists defending Burns on NBC’s "Today" Wednesday.
"Yeah, and Savannah, that’s completely fair that that was their experience. We can only report our own," Burns responded.