Sunday Morning Comin' Down: Disdain in Vain

Every week or two for the past very many years a wildfire of "OMFG! Why! Does! Chuck! Todd! Exist!" commentary like this --

The mythologizing of Meet the Press has always been a bit much, but under Chuck Todd it's just actively doing harm.

Just cancel it, for the love of God.

— Kevin M. Kruse (@KevinMKruse) November 22, 2020

-- and this --

It's clear that @MSNBC isn't paying attention to our tweets, because we've been screaming about firing that useless moron Chuck Todd for years, and he still has a job.

— BrooklynDad_Defiant! (@mmpadellan) November 22, 2020

-- has spread across social media for a few hours, maybe a day. maybe two...and then dies back down.

And before Chuck Todd, every week or two for several years a wildfire of "OMFG! Why! Does! David! Gregory! Even! Exist!" commentary would spread across social media for a few hours, maybe a day, and then dies back down.

So from my tiny cell in Twitmo, let me explain this one more time.

If Meet the Press were, say, a Twitter prison cafeteria meal it would be stew of rotting meat seasoned with turds from rats dying of arsenic positioning. But Chuck Todd doesn't wrangle the rats or dose them with poison or scoop up the decomposing roadkill that are the stew's main components of. The cafeteria menu, ingredients and portion control are the province of the NBC/Comcast corporation. Todd's job is to be the public face of corporate policy: to stand there in a hairnet every Sunday slopping a steaming helping of this fetid anti-journalism onto the plates of American public.

As I have written many different times in many different ways over the years:

...speaking with all the authority of someone who's been writing about the Sunday Gasbag Cavalcade for more than 15 years now (and plans to go right on documenting the atrocities) all of it was, is, and ever shall be completely justified.

But here's the thing. Complaining that Todd is a hack and a buffoon and a disgrace is a little like complaining that the clown that you hired to entertain at your kid's birthday shows up in clown makeup. Because being exactly the sort of hack and buffoon and disgrace that he is is exactly why Comcast/NBC hired Chuck Todd to replace David Gregory. Who, some of you older kids may remember, was just as godawful in exactly the same way as Todd.

In Chuck Todd, you are not seeing some tragic and accidental failure of journalism.

You are seeing the the triumph of corporate media.

Just as getting rid of the loathsome David Gregory began the Age of Todd, until NBC/Comcast management is driven out with pitchforks drastically reformed, getting rid of Todd will accomplish nothing. 

And speaking of corporate media, just so I get clear in my own mind how this business works, literally any Conservative/Republican can shed their inconvenient pasts as often as they please and they are automatically guaranteed a gig at a national magazine anytime they wish, no questions asked, right?

Yay!! https://t.co/a94r6ZCSrz

— Jennifer 'the people have decided' Rubin (@JRubinBlogger) November 22, 2020

Which I'm sure is super awesome for them, but does not bode well for that whole "People must be held accountable" thingie.  

No Half Measures