Meghan McCain will leave “The View” at the end of July, the co-host said at the beginning of the popular morning show on Thursday.
“This was not an easy decision,” she said of her departure, noting that the coronavirus pandemic had changed her priorities.
Ms. McCain, the show’s sole conservative voice, said she had discovered she was pregnant with her daughter just as the country was going into lockdown last year and quickly left New York, where the show is taped, for Washington.
“I just have this really wonderful life here that, ultimately, I felt like I didn’t want to leave,” she said of Washington.
Ms. McCain, the daughter of John McCain, the longtime Republican senator who died in 2018, and Cindy McCain, called her four years on the show “one of the hands-down greatest, most exhilarating, wonderful privileges of my entire life.”
Her tenure on “The View,” a production of ABC News started by the television journalist Barbara Walters, included a number of contentious exchanges with the show’s liberal co-hosts, Whoopi Goldberg, Joy Behar and Sunny Hostin. The women acknowledged the tension on air on Thursday, with Ms. Behar calling Ms. McCain a “formidable opponent” and “no snowflake.”
“You and I have had our disagreements, we’ve had our fights, but we’ve also had some drinking moments, which were rather fun and interesting,” Ms. Behar said. “We take a lot of hits on this show and we stood by our points of view, and you have done that brilliantly for four years.”
“You are a tough … that’s all I can say on daytime TV,” said Sara Haines, another co-host, who added that it was “an honor” to work with Ms. McCain.
In a statement, ABC News thanked Ms. McCain for her “passion and unique voice” and said that she recently told the network that she wanted to leave.
Ms. McCain noted that her father had encouraged her to join the show in 2017.
“Your dad was very smart,” Ms. Goldberg said in reply.
Ms. McCain described her co-hosts as “strong, brilliant, intelligent and credible broadcasters.”
“If five men were doing what we do every day,” she added, “I really do believe that we’d probably have a Pulitzer Prize at this point.”
Source: | This article originally belongs to Nytimes.com
