Monday, November 26, 2007

Update: Michelle Obama Will Not Appear on The View

Today on The View, Whoopi Goldberg announced that Michelle Obama will not appear as a guest co-host on December 5 after all. It seems that both Michelle Obama and John Edwards canceled scheduled appearances on The View to demonstrate their support for the television writers' strike. Whoopi Goldberg and Barbara Walters clarified that The View is able to continue despite the writers' strike (and presumably without offending the strikers?) because the show doesn't rely on writers--there's no monologue (unlike Leno, Letterman, Kimmel, and Ellen), and as we all know, the banter among the co-hosts is unscripted.

Michelle Obama and John Edwards are obviously free to schedule and cancel appearances as they please, but I'm not sure that their respective appearances (Obama as a guest co-host, Edwards as a guest) would have been interpreted as not supportive of the writers' strike. Then again, perhaps there's a complex television industry issue here that I just don't understand and that would have made their appearances entirely offensive to the strikers' efforts. I guess Hillary Clinton was lucky to make her appearance of The View before any of this began...

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