Chuck Todd on the Future of Meet the Press and Handling Election Deniers: ‘If You Don’t Accept the Premise, It’s Going to be a Painful Interview’
William B. Plowman/NBC
MSNBC’s Chuck Todd is done with Twitter — mostly.
The moderator of Meet the Press says he has stopped using the platform, which he compares to quitting smoking. But he still allows for the occasional hit, reserved for early mornings, when Twitter serves as a useful news feed.
“At 5:00 in the morning, it’s still better than any AP wire,” Todd told me on this week’s episode of The Interview podcast. “I definitely don’t even bother with Twitter, basically when the sun is out, or at night when the sun goes down, unless I’m watching a sporting event and I’m curious to see, hey, what do they think of Durant tonight?”
Todd pointed to groupthink that President Joe Biden could not win the Democratic primary in 2019, as a good reason to not take Twitter too seriously.
“The Democratic primary campaign should have been this wake up call for our entire industry,” he said. “There’s too many journalists think what what is said and happens on Twitter is representative of any sort of entity. It’s representative of the seven percent of people that are on Twitter.”
While he’s mostly off Twitter, Todd has been expanding his presence on air. In addition to hosting Meet the Press, the venerable Sunday show and longest running program on American television, Todd also hosts MTP Daily on MSNBC and Meet the Press Reports on NBC’s streaming platform Peacock — the season finale of which airs tonight. In between the many hours he spends on air, Todd is also the political director of NBC News.
The expansion of the Meet the Press brand is something that Todd has been committed to for more than a decade. He sees it as a vital move now as the media enters what he sees as an era of “uber fragmentation.”
“I have a memo that I wrote 12 years ago, that we’ve got to be careful, the Meet the Press brand can’t get stuck just be in a Sunday show. It’s bigger than that,” he said.
Meet the Press Reports, a 30-minute show that debuted last September and focuses on a single topic, allows for one more avenue of coverage. And with Peacock, NBC’s new streaming service, Todd says “we have the real estate to use.”
“I want to provide everything to the politically and policy engaged potential viewer of Meet the Press. I’ll have my standing Sunday show that gives you the opportunity to interact or see the power brokers. But we also want to do the smarter, deep dives.”
I also asked Todd about a recent debate among the Sunday show hosts: whether to interview Republicans who enabled former President Donald Trump’s efforts to overturn the election.
Todd interviewed one such Republican in May: Rep. Dan Crenshaw (R-TX). While Crenshaw voted to certify Biden’s election win (unlike many of his colleagues) he also supported the lawsuit from the Texas attorney general that sought to overturn the results in four states.
Todd didn’t let Crenshaw move on from the events that followed the 2020 election, despite the Texas Republican’s attempt to debate other topics. It made for a worthy display of a politician being held to account for his actions, and prompted praise for the anchor.
But before he would tell me whether he subscribed to Tapper or Wallace school of thought, Todd wanted to raise a gripe: While television news is relentlessly criticized for interviews with dishonest politicians, print media gets a pass.
“No one asked The New York Times whether they should interview Ron Johnson,” he said. “I don’t accept the premise that television should be treated differently than print.”
As for whether those politicians should be banned from Meet the Press, Todd is cautious.
“I think you’ve got to be careful of absolutes,” he said. “I feel like I have a compact with my viewers that they expect me to deliver them the information they need… You don’t know when somebody you think deserves to be banned is suddenly somebody that you’ve got to deal with. Because you may not like them, but they have the power. They’re the elected speaker of the House or something like that.”
When it comes to the interviews themselves, Todd has a simple solution for those who have trouble answering whether the 2020 election was legitimate.
“Accept the premise. And if you don’t accept the premise, yeah, it’s going to be a painful interview. If you accept the premise, it’s not going to be a painful interview. That’s the bottom line.”
He identified three groups of troublesome guests: the “absurd, ridiculous, uninformed gaslighters” (they’re not invited on the Sunday shows); the “professional hijackers” (they should be interviewed on tape, not live); and those who should face “accountability questions.”
Todd has still faced a heated backlash — mostly on Twitter — for hosting that third group. He sees that criticism as motivated by partisanship.
“Most of the criticism, by the way, that that we in the mainstream media receive is from people who are angry we’re not biased towards their opinion,” he said. “They’re not angry about what they’re actually seeing. They just want their beliefs channeled constantly.”
“But again, if you worry too much about the social media and you start to cater to the social media critics, you’re catering to seven percent of America and you’re catering to probably a fringe-y version. I mean, it’s not just the seven percent of America on Twitter. It’s this smaller percentage of that who think their opinions — who are so narcissistic that they think all of their opinions matter so much more than anybody else’s.”
We also discussed the summit between Joe Biden and Vladimir Putin and covering campaign politics after the Covid pandemic. Download the full episode now, and subscribe to The Interview on Apple Podcasts or Spotify.
