FNC's Shepard Smith sat down with the women on "The View" this morning for an interview covering balloon boy, opinion news shows, and the White House's position on Fox.

Joy Behar asked Smith if he ever felt like "an outcast over at Fox" as a straight news journalist compared with the opinion commentators. "No, come on," he said. "You can be around people who have opinions, can't you? I would hope so at HLN."

Elisabeth Hasselbeck asked if he thought the Obama administration's singling out of Fox News was unfair. "Oh, it's not a new thing," he said. "Administrations have been fighting with news organizations since time began, and I don't know, I think it helped us. It kind of looks like it did. When the white house is talking about you all the time, you know you got something going on."

When asked about the network's success, Smith pointed to FNC's strong performance during the election this week and said:

They're coming for the news. I mean, I think that people have, through all of this talk, people have come and sampled us and they've said, 'They are giving us the news. When they say it's opinion, it might be right-wing opinion. But when they say it's the news, it's the news.' There's truth in labeling and I feel good about that.

The hosts also took the opportunity to ask Smith about one of the big stories in October: balloon boy. Behar said, "the news organizations were highly criticized for the coverage," to which Smith replied, "What are you going to do? There's a balloon floating. The cops say there's a kid in it. It's running all across Colorado. We didn't have anything else going on. I mean, might as well follow the balloon."