NYU Professor Jay Rosen Tears Chuck Todd for Just Now Realizing Republicans Lie for Trump

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New York University Journalism Professor Jay Rosen tore into Chuck Todd over an interview in which the NBC anchor confessed to being “naive” about Republican “misinformation” in the era of President Donald Trump.

In a piece entitled “The Christmas Eve Confessions of Chuck Todd,” Rosen took the MSNBC anchor and Meet the Press host to task over a Rolling Stone interview that was published December 24 in which Todd was essentially trying to promote his upcoming MTP special “Alternative Facts: Inside the Weaponization of Disinformation.”

The title of Todd’s special is a reference to the phrase that Trump White House counselor Kellyanne Conway infamously coined right to Todd’s face while defending the verifiable lies that Sean Spicer told on his very first day as Trump’s White House press secretary.

That brief interview turned into the series of “confessions” that Rosen describes in his blistering commentary.

In response to the very first question, Todd came pretty close to self-indictment when he noted that “The first Sunday of the Trump administration is when the phrase, ‘alternative facts’ was debuted. It was on Meet the Press that Rudy Giuliani used the phrase ‘Truth isn’t truth.’ So look, whether we’d liked it or not, our platform has been used, or they’ve attempted to use our platform to essentially disseminate, or to sort of, what I would say, is lay the groundwork for this.”

Todd did push back on Conway, and on Giuliani’s declaration that “Truth isn’t truth,” but in the bulk of the interview proceeds to admit that he was slow to believe that Trump and his allies would weaponize disinformation (although, as Rosen notes, Todd keeps calling it “misinformation” despite the fact that “disinformation” is in the title of his own special), and that he was “absurdly naive” for failing to recognize it.

Rosen took issue with Todd’s excuse:

It’s not naive of him. It’s malpractice. Chuck Todd’s entire brand is based on the claim that he understands politics. Since 2007 he has been NBC’s political director, which means he has influence over all coverage. He is literally the in-house expert on the subject. You don’t get to claim you are naive about politics when you have these kinds of positions. It would be like a chief risk officer saying, “I didn’t understand the gamble we were taking.” Well, that’s your job.

Rosen went on to write that Todd’s problem is “not naiveté. It’s a willful blindness to what the Republican Party had become,” that “He’s not naive. He’s an insider who thought his read was better,” and that “It’s not naive. It’s a lack of imagination, a failure of insight,” detailing Todd’s failures under each heading.

Alternative Facts: Inside the Weaponization of Disinformation airs next Sunday, Dec. 29.