Chuck Todd Insists No Bias at Daytime MSNBC: ‘No Editorial Point of View on Any of These Newscasts’
MSNBC anchor Chuck Todd, who uses a public relations agent to keep his Wikipedia page free of claims that he might be biased, insisted Wednesday that his network’s daytime newscasts are completely free of any “editorial point of view.”
Todd made the claim after MSNBC’s Katy Tur blasted President Donald Trump for holding campaign events in the wake of the coronavirus pandemic in an interview with Trump campaign communications director Tim Murtaugh.
Murtaugh accused MSNBC of hypocrisy for criticizing the president’s rallies, arguing, “When it is a large gathering with a political message that MSNBC would agree with, suddenly safety measures are really on the back burner.”
“We’ll note the president is the only one having indoor rallies or events of that scale in the entire country,” Tur replied. “We just saw the images of those rallies, people were not wearing masks inside the president’s rally, no social distancing being practiced. We saw the signs being removed from seats. You can say you handed out hand sanitizer and gave out masks.”
“I appreciate that speech,” Murtaugh responded. After an awkward pause, Todd ended the segment. “And just a reminder, for what it’s worth, there is no editorial view here on any of these newscasts on MSNBC in the daytime,” he said.
Todd bristles at the accusation that his network is less than neutral, despite being a popular target for conservatives who feel MSNBC is biased. He also benefited from an NBC initiative to scrub information from Wikipedia. The PR agent NBC hired, Ed Sussman, successfully sought to remove information from Todd’s page about a 2015 dinner party his wife hosted for Hillary Clinton’s communications director at the time, Jennifer Palmieri.
The revelation came out in 2016 in emails leaked by WikiLeaks linked to Clinton campaign Chairman John Podesta, who the Todds invited to the party. Mediaite previously reported on WikiLeaks’ revelation that Rep. Debbie Wasserman-Schultz (D-FL), then the chair of the Democratic National Committee, used Todd as an intermediary to ask morning anchor Mika Brzezinski to be less critical of Wasserman-Schultz. “Chuck, this must stop,” she wrote in the subject line of an email.
The Huffington Post first noted the effort to clean up Wikipedia pages for NBC executives in 2019, as part of the network’s reported effort to combat allegations it squashed Ronan Farrow’s reporting on sexual abuse by film producer Harvey Weinstein.
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