Chuck Todd clearly preferred the “good old days” for liberals in the media, when they had the entire field to themselves. At one time, they had all three major TV networks, the major newsmagazines, most of the major daily newspapers, and they controlled book publishing.
In a recent article in The Atlantic, Todd, the moderator of NBC’s iconic Meet the Press program, said it is time to “fight back” against the “campaign to destroy the legitimacy of the American news media.” To liberal “journalists” such as Todd, the liberal political position is the default “correct” position, and any viewpoints that are contrary to that worldview are not just wrong, but don’t even deserve to be considered.
As is typical, Todd plays the “race card” against the handful of conservatives in the media. He bemoans the “antipathy toward the media,” which “has risen to a level I’ve never personally experienced before. The closest parallel in recent American history is the hostility to reporters in the segregated South in the 1950s and ‘60s.” And, if that is not tarring those who despise the left-wing slant of the mainstream media enough, he adds, “Figures such as Rush Limbaugh, Matt Drudge, and the trio of Sean Hannity, Tucker Carlson, and Laura Ingraham have attained wealth and power by exploiting the fears of older white people.” Of course, Todd is a multimillionaire, but perhaps he thinks he has obtained his wealth by the supposedly more noble cause of advancing the progressive agenda.
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His central villain in his cast of enemies is President Donald Trump, who has called the media the “enemy of the people,” but Todd says the credit for this near-universal dislike and mistrust of “mainstream” media figures lies more with the late Roger Ailes, who got his start as one of President Richard Nixon’s “angry” foot soldiers. Todd calls Ailes the “godfather of the Trump presidency.”
Todd apparently thinks support for any Republican presidential candidate — not just Trump — is some sort of moral failure, as he decries Ailes’ work for then-Vice President George H.W. Bush in 1988. Todd writes that Ailes saved Bush from defeat in the campaign against Massachusetts Governor Michael Dukakis by “exploiting a series of superficial issues.”
But Todd reserves his special animosity toward Ailes for his role in the creation of Fox News. “In the early 90s, while he was president of CNBC, Ailes had a hunch that an evening lineup catering to a culturally conservative audience would thrive.” The folks at NBC weren’t interested in such a lineup — no surprise there — but Ailes got financial backing from Rupert Murdoch. Fox News was the result, and, according to Todd, the new network was more interested in putting commentary ahead of reporting — by attacking “the integrity of the rest of the media.”
Now, Todd admits there are some good journalists at Fox News, mentioning Shepherd Smith, a liberal who would fit in well at MSNBC or CNN.
“Critics may be accusing journalists of having deliberately and consciously shaped their reporting to serve some political end,” Todd wrote. “That sort of overt bias is far rarer. Ironically, the best example of this kind of bias airs regularly in prime time on Fox News.”
Fox News certainly has a line-up of commentators in the evening that offer different views from that found on MSNBC or CNN. All one has to do is watch a few days of CNN or MSNBC, then a few days of Fox to think one is living in a different universe.
But when it comes to bias in the media, Chuck Todd is the poster child.
While in college, Todd worked on the 1992 presidential campaign of Senator Tom Harkin, a very liberal Democrat from Iowa. Todd’s tilt to the left did not end in college, however. His wife, Kristian, is the co-founder of Maverick Strategies, which handles direct mail and other consulting services for Democratic candidates and progressive causes.
The Daily Caller reported on October 17, 2016 that Todd (who wrote in his Atlantic piece that “bias airs regularly in prime time on Fox News”) and his wife actually hosted a dinner party in 2015 for Jennifer Palmieri, the communications director for Hillary Rodham Clinton! The Daily Caller observed, “The invite is just the latest glaring example of the cozy relationship between mainstream journalists and the Clinton campaign.”
Speaking of the Clinton campaign in 2016, Todd, while “reporting” at the Republican National Convention in Cleveland, dismissed the Republicans’ use of Benghazi as nothing more than “cheap unity” for the “lowest common denominator” crowd. Todd snarkily remarked, “[Trump] needs a little cheap unity.”
Todd’s bias against Republican candidates does not stop with Trump. Reporting on the U.S. Senate race in Alabama, between Republican Roy Moore and Democrat Doug Jones, Todd quoted Judge Moore, falsely insinuating that Moore had misquoted the U.S. Constitution.
“First off, he doesn’t appear to believe in the Constitution as it’s written,” Todd said. Todd then played a clip of Moore referencing what is written in the Declaration of Independence.
“Our rights don’t come from government,” Moore said. “They don’t come from the Bill of Rights. They come from Almighty God.”
Todd, who apparently is ignorant of one of America’s founding principles — that our rights come, as President John F. Kennedy said in his inaugural address, “not from the generosity of the state, but from the hand of God” — then commented, “Now, that’s just a taste of what are very fundamentalist views that have gotten him removed from office twice as Alabama’s chief justice.”
The “taste” that it gives us is the secular and liberal bias we get on a regular basis from Chuck Todd and his liberal buddies in most of the mainstream media. No wonder so many Americans do not trust the media that Todd personifies.
Photo: AP Images
