Dan Abrams Torches NBC For Replacing Chuck Todd: He ‘Was Forced Out’
Mediaite founder Dan Abrams accused NBC of “lying” about Chuck Todd’s departure from Meet the Press and replacing him with Kristen Welker on his SiriusXM show Monday, arguing that Todd was “forced out” despite his talents as a broadcaster.
On Sunday, Semafor reported that Todd was shopping around for a new job in anticipation of the end of his contract with NBC. He announced he would be stepping down as the host of Meet the Press in 2023, declaring on air that “The key to the survival of any of these media entities, including here at Meet the Press, is for leaders to not overstay their welcome. I’d rather leave a little bit too soon than stay a tad too long.”
Abrams said at the time that Todd had clearly been sidelined at NBC.
“On my NewsNation show, I went after NBC and Chuck Todd when they announced that he was stepping down as host of Meet the Press last year, or actually in 2023. And my criticism was that a news operation that is supposed to be seeking out the truth, and providing its viewers and readers with accurate information, calling out fact from fiction, almost certainly — and now we know they… created a fictionalized version of what happened with Chuck Todd,” he began.
Abrams went on to submit that Todd “was forced out of his role and replaced with Kristen Welker,” and to insist that the statements issued by both Todd and NBC at the time were “untrue.”
“They should not be lying to us,” he said before going on to make the case that Todd was a better host of the show than Welker. “Now, Chuck Todd was much better at hosting Meet the Press than Kristen Welker. He asked smarter follow-up questions, The show was more interesting,” asserted Abrams.
Abrams went on to argue that Todd ultimately lost his role because he was tough on both conservatives and liberals, and therefore didn’t have a “political community behind him.”
“And in the world we live in that is now a negative. That is now held against you. And so now Meet the Press has someone hosting the show who is less good — by any objective assessment — than Chuck Todd was,” he said. “And talk to people who were fans of Meet the Press who are-, who aren’t overt political partisans, and they’ll just tell you the show was a smarter show when Chuck Todd was there. So bottom line is: Whoever gets Chuck Todd, I think’ll be lucky.”
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