Late last year, NBC’s Chuck Todd sat for an interview with Rolling Stone Magazine. To say that it did not go well would be the supreme journalistic understatement of 2019.
There were any number of cringe-worthy moments in Todd’s interview, all of which confirmed longstanding serious concerns and questions as to exactly why Chuck Todd is on television at all, let alone posing as a serious conduit and analyst of “news.”
Indeed, Todd is host of not just the longest-running “news” show on television, “Meet the Press,” but the longest-running television show ever.
Thus, his admission that for the past three consecutive years he has been living in a state of “naïveté” about the Republican Party and the Trump regime’s relentless and (to everyone else but him) obvious disinformation campaigns, was not as shocking as it was just plain sad.
For example, when asked about former White House press secretary Sean Spicer’s daily lies, misdirections, obfuscations, and maladroits, Todd, with a straight face and no hint of shame, confessed that he “really believed they [Trump officials] wouldn’t do this” — that is, straight-up lie to his straight face every chance they got.
Todd did describe his 2017 attitude and frame of mind as “just absurdly naive in hindsight.”
But like Trump’s minions, subalterns, sycophants, and enablers themselves, Todd immediately tried to paper over his political “naïveté” with an “everybody-does-it” rationale:
I think we all made the mistake of not following [the late] Toni Morrison’s advice, which is when people tell you who they are, believe them.
This was perhaps the cringey-est of all his cringe-worthy statements. This man supposedly not only reports but “interprets” the news for millions upon millions of people on a daily and weekly basis. This man has immediate, fingertip access to research capabilities, facilities and researchers of one of the oldest and largest news organizations in the country, and which actually rivals or surpasses even some prestigious universities and colleges in its breadth and depth of “news” gathering and dissemination. How, then, could this “journalist” not know the difference between the two most revered, respected, and celebrated black women authors of the bygone 20th and still youthful 21st centuries?
Could it be that to Todd, like far too many so-called “white” people, black people really do pretty much all look alike? Or, perhaps Todd subscribes to the well-established fact that once you’ve read one black writer, you’ve read them all?
(A Rolling Stone editor quietly footnoted the interview, and correctly attributed the famous quote to the also late Maya Angelou rather than to the more recently deceased Toni Morrison ).
Jay Rosen teaches journalism at New York University. The good professor recently gave us yet another pointed example of Todd’s admitted naïveté– an example which, in fact, reveals that Todd may suffer more from a case of willful ignorance than innocent naïveté:
Three years after Kellyanne Conway introduced the doctrine of “alternative facts” on his own program, a light went on for Chuck Todd, said Rosen.
Republican strategy, he now realized, was to make stuff up, spread it on social media, repeat it in your answers to journalists — even when you know it’s a lie with crumbs of truth mixed in — and then convert whatever controversy arises into go-get-em points with the base, while pocketing for the party a juicy dividend: additional mistrust of the news media to help insulate President Trump among loyalists when his increasingly brazen actions are reported as news. [Emphasis added]
As to Todd’s admitted naiveté, the professor allowed that Todd’s self-description as “absurd” was “an astounding statement that brought into serious question his fitness for office as host of ‘Meet the Press.’”
Other media observers raised similar concerns about Chuck Todd:
After Chuck Todd‘s revelations, why is he the host of MEET THE PRESS one of the most influential news programs that allegedly holds politicians accountable? Why is the bar so low? It’s so painful for the rest of us who have actual skin in the game & so damaging for our democracy, wrote New York Times op-ed writer Wajahat Ali.