NBC’s Today Sounds Like MSNBC in Ranking 2013’s Top Political Events

NBC’s Today took a look at the events which shaped 2013 on Monday. In a series of Top 10 lists, the hosts and a guest ranked the moments which changed millions of lives in 2013 and your biases will be confirmed by virtually every pick. Needless to say, a large portion of Today’s audience will agree with these lists, the hosts’ ranking of events, and the commentary that accompanied each pick. However, it is also a safe bet to say that if a single conservative was sitting on that panel, both the list and the commentary would have varied dramatically.

TheCulturalist.com founder Jordan Roth opened the segment by presenting an aggregate of users’ choices for most important events of 2013 ranked in order from least to most impactful.

At number 10, that site’s users thought that state Sen. Wendy Davis’ (D-Fort Worth) pro-abortion rights filibuster in the state of Texas was one of the most important moments of the year. “People felt like if we had more leaders willing to stand for what’s right, might just get somewhere,” Roth said.

Outranking the Affordable Care Act’s roll-out, an event which is almost certain to reverberate into 2014 and practically define that year’s election cycle is an event which had no impact on the political environment the moment it concluded: October’s government shutdown.

“Yeah, but I called it the GOP shutdown,” Bryant Gumbel interjected out of the blue, apparently vexed that his preferred re-branding of the shutdown had not taken hold in the national consciousness. “I thought it was a false equivalency to say it was a government shutdown, a failure of government. It was not.”

“A lot of our users put a lot of blame on the Republicans,” Roth agreed, shocking precisely no one.

Moving on to the host’s lists of top events of 2013, Jane Pauley added the “economic recovery” to her list of events at number eight. “It was a slow moving momentous event, not a moment,” Pauley said, conceding that many people do not yet feel it… Leaving one to wonder why she included it at all, save for the fact that she was compelled to note she believes the macroeconomic picture is generally improving five years after the start of the 2008 recession.

Pauley, too, ranked the government shutdown above the ACA roll-out, at the second most impactful event of the year. For Pauley, the shutdown narrowly beat out the Boston Marathon Bombing in which three died and 264 were wounded.

The Boston bombings did not even make Gumbel’s list, although he did rank the ACA roll-out slightly above the government shutdown. Matt Lauer, however, ranked the bombings as the most important event of the year, citing the fact that the Tsarnaev brothers shut down an American city for a week and probably forever changed the way in which event security is handled in the future.

Of course, these are all valid perspectives on the year’s events and they are shared by millions. But there is a great swath of the American public for whom these lists and the hosts take on these events is not representative. But, perhaps those Americans do not occupy a key demographic.

Watch the clip below via NBC:

[Photo via screen grab ]

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

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