How Did Chuck Todd’s ‘No Climate Deniers’ Meet the Press Pledge Turn Into a Near-Blackout of Climate Change Coverage?

Six months after NBC’s Chuck Todd pledged to no longer debate the reality of climate change on Meet the Press, his promising editorial stance has devolved into a troubling and shameful near-blackout of coverage of the issue.

Through the first half of this year, Todd has asked only a handful of questions about climate change in total, changed the subject on the few occasions Democrats have brought it up on their own, and never once dared to confront Republican climate deniers about their phony beliefs.

It wasn’t supposed to be this way.

At the end of December, Todd had undertaken an unprecedented step in the annals of Sunday morning news shows. He not only dedicated an entire Meet the Press episode to discussing climate change — he also made a point of not stooping to false equivalence by giving time to those who deny the overwhelming scientific evidence of climate change’s existence and its anthropogenic causes.

“We’re going to take an in-depth look, regardless of that, at a literally Earth-changing subject that doesn’t get talked this thoroughly about on television news: climate change,” Todd declared. “But just as important as what we are going to do this hour, is what we’re not going to do. We’re not going to debate climate change, the existence of it. The Earth is getting hotter and human activity is a major cause. Period. We won’t give time to climate deniers. The science is settled, even if political opinion is not.”

This bold-by-TV-news-standards move seemed to indicate that Todd had learned from a painful lesson from the previous month, when he was roasted for allowing conservative pundit Danielle Pletka, who has no expertise in climate science, to peddle several dismissive and distorted claims about climate change on a Meet the Press panel with no pushback whatsoever.

But the six-month aftermath of Todd’s December epiphany has been something of another climate change disaster, one that is also man-made.

Since Todd’s admirable, single-focus segment, climate change has gone almost completely missing from Meet the Press broadcasts. A survey of its shows from January through June found less than 10 minutes of discussion about the topic out of the nearly 1,000 minutes of Sunday morning airtime, or just one percent of the total. Likewise, Todd hasn’t interviewed a single climate scientist about the issue since December, despite numerous newsworthy Washington moments and natural disasters explicitly related to the topic.

Even more notably, the preponderance of Meet the Press‘s scant discussion of the issue came as a result of Democratic politicians bringing up the Earth’s climate crisis unprompted. While Todd has discussed the politics of the progressive Democrats’ Green New Deal on occasion, he has never used that platform as a way to kick-off an in-depth policy discussion of climate change this year. In all, Todd has asked only a handful of direct questions about climate change policy since 2018.

A perfect case study of Todd’s almost willful climate change avoidance was his April 14th interview with Washington Gov. Jay Inslee, who has made addressing climate change the centerpiece of his 2020 campaign.

This nine-minute interview (watch the whole segment below) was, by far, the longest single amount of time in which Todd addressed climate change policy in the first six months of 2019. And yet, not even a third of this interview — with a candidate that literally wants to talk about climate change more than anything else — actually touched on the topic. What’s more, throughout the segment, Todd seemed to intentionally circle around the issue, like when the NBC host followed up his introduction to Inslee by awkwardly transitioning to a question about sanctuary cities.

“Jay Inslee is trying to meet [the challenge] by focusing on one issue: confronting climate change. His is a state with many sanctuary cities. Just the kind of place President Trump is sending migrants. Welcome to Meet the Press.”

Other times, Todd seemed to be almost taunting Inslee, either by wholly disregarding the candidate’s comments on climate change or by bringing it up only to inexplicably segue to another issue:

“You want to make, and you’ve said this very clear, the centerpiece of your campaign is combating climate change and everything is a derivative of that. It is a good way to get people to pay attention to you on day one of your candidacy. But as you know, health care is the number one issue among many Democratic primary voters. So, for instance, where do you stand on health care? Is it for something Medicare for All, or ObamaCare plus.”

In an ironic twist, guess which pundit was on the Meet the Press panel the same week that Inslee appeared? Pletka, the very same right-wing commentator that had so outrageously spread climate change disinformation on Todd’s show back in November. Plus ça change… Mercifully, in this case, the panel did not discuss climate change.

However, that brings up the other fundamental dilemma facing Todd: a modern Republican Party that has institutionally embraced a  fringe, extremist climate denialism stance that stands apart from not just scientific consensus, but every other mainstream conservative political party in the industrialized world.

The depth and breadth of the problem becomes evident when you examine the Meet the Press guest roster from the first three months of 2019 and find that the show played host to a dozen conservative pundits or Republican politicians — an average of one a week — who have either outright denied climate change or expressed baseless skepticism about it.

Whether it was political figures like Rep. Liz Cheney, Sen. Ron Johnson, or White House Chief of Staff Mick Mulvaney or conservative commentators like John Podhoretz, Hugh Hewitt, or Peggy Noonan, Meet the Press was — and still is — a veritable hotbed of climate deniers.

This reality brings up a series of vexing questions for Todd’s show as well as any other responsible news program trying to cover climate change: How can any journalist who declares he or she will no longer abide disinformation about climate change disentangle the “settled science” from the “political opinion” they cover?

How can any news organization host a fair, accurate, and worthwhile “political” discussion about policy solutions to anthropogenic climate change if one political party openly dismisses and often lies about the existence of the threat itself? And how can a prestigious news platform, like Meet the Press, routinely play host to climate deniers without indirectly legitimizing their fringe beliefs — even if they never air their climate denialist views on the broadcast?

So far this year, Chuck Todd’s strategy for addressing these questions seems to involve a very similar approach to both Republicans and Democrats: avoid it. Hence, he hasn’t bothered to confront any of his many, documented climate denier guests about their past detached-from-reality claims. Of course, a mainstream news show like Meet the Press can’t simply embargo the current White House staff, a sizable majority of the Republican Congressional caucus, and much of the right-wing commentariat because they have adopted a giant myth-making campaign.

Still, an intellectually honest news show can’t duck this untenable situation forever. At some point, some right-wing figure appearing on Meet the Press will say something that directly contradicts the overwhelming scientific consensus on climate change — and, at that point, what will Todd do? Bluntly call them out as liars — and risked being seen as “biased” — or retreat into a hypocritical crouch that gives deference to opinion over scientific fact? And will he then gladly invite whoever was the guilty part to come back on air the next week?

A day of reckoning is coming for Chuck Todd and the show itself, in other words.

Last year, he and Meet the Press took an encouraging — and long overdue — step forward. But he will have to seriously re-engage and step up his show’s coverage of the looming, emergent threat facing our planet if he is to follow through on his promise. He will have to decide just how strongly he will stand up for facts versus myths, and science versus spin, as the calendar marches further toward a 2020 presidential election that will most assuredly pit a climate change-accepting Democratic challenger up against President Donald Trump, the Climate Change Denier-in-Chief.

Screengrab image via MSNBC.

This is an opinion piece. The views expressed in this article are those of just the author.

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