In an effort "to refashion the liberal cable channel as a straight-forward news and politics offering," NBC News' supreme Andrew Lack is calling home MSNBC's "The Cycle," "Now with Alex Wagner" and "The Ed Show."
Yet Lord Lack moves in mysterious ways. He giveth relief and taketh it right back: "MSNBC will add a 5 p.m. program hosted by 'Meet The Press' moderator Chuck Todd."
I can't quite identify the source of my rather extreme Toddian discomfort. It could be that his hovering all-knowingness and "insider" certainty rub my Montaignean skepticism the wrong way. But those are hardly rare attributes in network pundits. So I just don't know.
At any rate, my creeping uneasiness has converted into full-blown apoplexy. Here I am, with neighbors in the foreground, upon hearing Mr. Todd last week — or is that Rachel Maddow? — on the teevee machine:
I watch Meet the Press to keep up with political conventional wisdom and usually fast-forward through at least a third of it. There's no other reason to pay attention to Todd.
Posted by: Bob | July 31, 2015 at 12:09 PM
Your Toddian discomfort is likely because Chuck Todd is a walking billboard for all that is wrong with political media and news in this country right now. He had some utility in the 2008 election as a voting pattern analyst for MSNBC's election coverage. Somehow he parlayed that into becoming NBC's White House correspondent, where he joined luminaries such as Major Garrett and Ed Henry in asking fatuous questions aimed more at making the White House look bad than in extracting information that is useful to the public.
Then somehow, NBC realized that Meet the Press was swirling the drain with professional bootlicker and Karl Rove dance partner David Gregory at the helm, and managed to replace him with Chuck Todd, one of the only people on earth other than Ron Fournier who might actually be worse at the job than Gregory was.
(I have a theory that this is all some bizarre effort to make Tim Russert look better in death than he ever did in life, but that's for another time.)
Since taking that gig and steering the show even further into the ditch than it already was, Chuck has admitted more than once in interviews that he is unable or unwilling to ask Republican guests any real questions, or challenge their blatant dishonesty, because doing so would upset them and they might not come back on the show. He has also said in the recent past that it's "not his job" to correct lies about Obamacare, and that the Republicans' ability to flood the airwaves with these lies just meant that they were "messaging well" on the topic.
In short, Chuck Todd (again, with the possible exception of Ron Fournier) is the worst conventional wisdom puke funnel in the business and he, and people like him, carry much blame for the sorry state of our political conversation.
And yet, in spite of all this (which he himself has admitted to, mind you) he keeps getting pushed on us. Which is just confirmation of how f'ed up the political media ecosystem is now.
Posted by: Turgidson | July 31, 2015 at 03:33 PM