(I assume you all know who Chuck Todd is. He’s been the host of Meet the Press for about a decade.)
Yay.
I caught the last five minutes of MTP yesterday, and it was about the most defensive, condescending farewell speech I’ve ever heard, including Nixon’s “Kick Dick Nixon” screed.
It was also the most welcome, why-did-this-take-so-long, event on TV in quite a while.
His theme was “I take the criticism I’ve gotten as a compliment” which is perhaps the most clueless statement I’ve ever heard. How about you got nothing but criticism because you sucked at your job, dickhead?
I know his name, and I’ve seen people celebrating his removal on Twitter, but I don’t really watch Meet the Press. What were his main deficiencies? Was he a hopeless both-sideser? Something else?
He allowed himself to be tool of the Republicans. When Democrats come on the show, he can ask the hard questions. Republicans won’t stand for that and won’t come on the show unless the kid gloves are on. So he lets them come on and give their talking points and if there’s an obvious follow up question hanging right over the plate, he won’t take a swing. This in the name of keeping access to the Republicans. Everything he presents is in the frame of “will this hurt the Democrats?”
Thanks! I assumed it was something like this. I wonder if Republicans feel it was the converse (rightly or wrongly – there’s no universe where asking which magazines you read is a tough question).
To answer the sulky passive-aggressive way you framed this new OP after your original useless OP was moderated - no, without any link or explanation I did not know who Chuck Todd is, not did I know what “MTP” meant.
This is why I quit watching 60 Minutes after decades of regular viewing. Leslie Stahl interviewed Trump multiple times during his presidency, lobbing softball after softball and never pushing back at all on the lies and BS. Mike Wallace was probably spinning in his grave at around 5000 rpm.
Then, just few days after the Jan 6 assault on the Capitol, she did an interview with a still visibly shaken Nancy Pelosi, and that’s when she decided to start asking the tough hard-hitting questions.
So you don’t watch the show, and you base your loathing of him on what other people say. Have I got that right?
Not watching the show because of what other people say about the host is not an unreasonable position. Coming to absolute conclusions about the host based on what other people say does not convince me that your second-hand assessment is worth accumulating a mouthful of saliva to spit on it.
Not even close. I watched it, off and on, for a few years when he started hosting: I was pretty sick of David Gregory, his predecessor, and thought maybe Todd would do a better job. I was completely wrong, and I stopped watching almost entirely.
But Twitter kept me up to date whenever he’d piss people off, which was often, and I’d see two- or three-minute clips of his more outrageous bootlicking behavior, assuring me he hadn’t changed and had almost certainly gotten to be even more and more of a servile tool who paid no attention to the criticism of his toadying.
Moreover, my DVR is set to record Way Too Early on MSNBC, and it starts recording a few minutes early, so I always get the last few minutes of MTP on Monday mornings, which is enough to infuriate anyone.
I could never put my finger on it, but Todd always seemed to me like someone who had risen past his level of competency, as if NBC was trying to quickly fill the slot and picked someone with name recognition rather than skill.
I’m curious what you thought of Tim Russert as host of Meet the Press. I almost never watch the show, but I would occasionally see Russert, Gregory, or Todd in action. On the few occasions I watched Russert, he fact-checked and asked follow up questions, and was very fast on his feet. The others…not at all.
This is all very complicated. It seems that you are essentially in a quantum superposition of watching it and being disgusted by it, and being so disgusted by it that you do not watch it?
Seems a strange pitting. Yes he was often too soft, and didn’t ask follow-up questions. But that’s basically all of American political TV. Apart from the channels that are overtly in the tank for the GOP.
This is not to excuse Todd on the basis that “everyone’s terrible”, merely to say it’s strange to single him out and use language like “dickhead”.
Yeah, I never quite got the hate for Chuck Todd. He’s a good political analyst, and election time was really his time to shine, with his enthusiastic county-by-county breakdowns of ongoing election results. In that regard I thought he was at least as good as his fellow NBC analyst, media darling Steve Kornacki.
I think Todd really knows his stuff politically, he was just often overmatched in interviews.
The excuse they give in not following up with Republicans is that would lose their access to them. I say if you’re not going to use the access, you might as well not have the access. I’d like to know where I could get a breakdown of MTP guests by party. My guess is about 2 Republicans for ever Democrat, so about 2/3 GOP.