Chuck Todd Is Alive And Well And Living On Conservative Radio

Scientists have long pondered the question: "Is Chuck Todd as big a 'Both Sides Do It' hack as he appeared to be when he had the big chair on Meet the Press, or was he performing the part of a Both Sides Do It hack on Meet the Press because that's what NBC executives require of anyone who sits in that chair?"  

Sadly this question seemed doomed to remain a topic of mere idle armchair speculation, with scientists spending their lunch breaks arguing one side of the question and then swapping around and arguing the other (you know how scientists are) because there was insufficient funding available to build the extremely sensitive equipment that would be required to settle the matter.

And then, one day last week, on local radio, right here in Springfield, Illinois, the matter was settled when Chuck Todd dropped by the Patrick Pfingsten show on WMAY to remove all doubt.

A thing to know about Mr. Pfingsten is that he is, in his own words, "a conservative who's a former Republican" who, like so many other Never Trumpers who got run out of their own party but cannot abide admitting that, far from being the dirty, commie, America-hating, terrorist-loving, baby-killing  caricatures his party made us out to be, we on the Left are, in fact, the only group who have been right about the Right all along.  

And so Mr. Pfingsten has taken up residence in the mighty fortress of "Both Sides Do It" about which we had a long chat one post ago.  You should also know that the station where Mr. Pfingsten works also syndicates Brian Kilmeade and Clay Travis, so put a pin in that because it'll come up later.

Anyway, out of the clear blue comes now Chuck Todd to share his cultural and political wisdom two days after Charlie Kirk was killed.  And I, your humble scrivener, listened to the whole fucking thing, grinding a quarter in of enamel off my back molars in the process.  So here are selected portions of that conversation.  It does not start well.

TODD:  Well, here's the thing. We we all kind of know what we should be doing, but in  in some ways, you know, our ... we're going to have to give up hoping our political leaders are going to do the right things.

Right off the bat, fuck you and your "our political leaders" claptrap, Chuck Todd.  It's Republican political leaders, starting with President Shits-His-Pants von Cheats-At-Golf, who throw gas on these fires, and Democratic political leaders who try to tamp it down, which he fucking well knows.

TODD:  Sometimes you need incentives to do the right thing. You need reward structures to do the right thing. And right now all of our incentives are aligned against us ... uh... to, to bring us together. All of the incentives are aligned against us to sort of figure out how to act bipartisan.

And right there, in three short sentences, Chuck Todd memory holes the legacy of the last three Democratic administrations, and the increasingly berserk Republican reactions to each of them.  And, again, Todd fucking well knows better.

 

From The Brookings Institution, April 27, 2012:

Let’s Just Say It: The Republicans are the Problem

by Thomas E. Mann and Norman Ornstein

...We have been studying Washington politics and Congress for more than 40 years, and never have we seen them this dysfunctional. In our past writings, we have criticized both parties when we believed it was warranted. Today, however, we have no choice but to acknowledge that the core of the problem lies with the Republican Party.

The GOP has become an insurgent outlier in American politics. It is ideologically extreme; scornful of compromise; unmoved by conventional understanding of facts, evidence and science; and dismissive of the legitimacy of its political opposition.

When one party moves this far from the mainstream, it makes it nearly impossible for the political system to deal constructively with the country’s challenges.

Chuck Todd continues, remembering 9/11 as a great, uniting experience.  

TODD:  9/11 is the last time we ... we ... we really got ... we brought ... got brought together as a country and it lasted a good year or so.  But even when we  stopped being united, y'know, the wars.  The... the wars divided us,  it was respectful right?  It was sort of  conventional political debate.

No surprise that a creature of a Beltway media that rolled over for Bush and Cheney remembers those times very differently than those of us who live in the real world.  There are literally tens of thousands of Liberal blog posts by those of us who were writing about what was really going on in real time, but this should give you a taste of what those "respectful", "conventional" debates  were actually like:

 

The host then chimes in that, yes, it was all great until those god damn Liberals...

PFINGSTEN:  I don't know. There was a lot of calling George Bush a war criminal...

For the record George Bush and Dick Cheney were and are war criminals.

And the rest is just more cask-strength, Chuck Todd Both Sides Do It drivel

TODD:   I mean, this is where I don't, you know, if you go online, most conservatives think most liberals are communists and most liberals think most conservatives are fascists... The online world has us at each other's throats. 

For the record, conservatives were making a living slagging us liberals as dirty, commie, America-hating, terrorist-loving, baby-killing monsters long before "the online world" was as omnipresent as it is now.  And, for the record, conservatives nominated a degenerate, corrupt, lying, rapist, racist, fascist for president three times in a row and elected him twice, so yeah, the case for thinking most conservatives are fascists is fucking well open and shut.

TODD:  It is instead like you could build an audience much faster if you go hard right or hard left, right? 

Who is there "hard left" of which Todd speaks?  Where are they?  And what the hell does Todd think "hard left" even means?

TODD:  The left doesn't police the left and the right doesn't police the right.

For the record, everybody polices the left.  The legacy media Tone Police stomp all over any Liberal who raises their voice using unapproved vocabulary.   Meanwhile, nobody polices the Right, which is how hate-vampires like Charlie Kirk came to be.

From Pharyngula of the Free Thought Blogs:

Never has a man’s own words so adeptly justified contempt for him

People are having a grand time digging through Charlie Kirk’s own words to show that he deserved being dragged.

It’s tempting to sit down and just compile a list of all the hateful things the man said — I could spend the next few weeks documenting what a horrible little man he was. But that’s something that should have been done before he was killed, because what should have been assassinated was his reputation while he was cuddling up to racists and anti-semites and anti-gay and trans people, all that stuff journalists shied away from while he was living and building a movement. All we can do now is condemn him when it is too late...

See also, "Murc's Law":

“Murc’s Law” [was] named after a commenter at the blog Lawyers, Guns, and Money who noticed years ago the habitual assumption among the punditry that Republican misbehavior can only be caused by Democrats. Do Republicans reject climate science? Must be because Democrats failed to persuade them! Did Republicans pass unpopular tax cuts for the rich? Must be that Democrats didn’t do enough to guide them to better choices! Do Republicans keep voting for lunatics and fascists? It must be the fault of Democrats for being mean to them! Even D____ T____’s election was widely blamed on Democrats — who voted against him, to be clear — on the bizarre grounds that Barack Obama should have rolled over and just let Mitt Romney win in 2012:

Chuck Todd continues:

TODD:  10 years ago, 15 years ago, if  there was a bad actor on one side or the  other, this, you know, there would be people that would speak out about it so that the totality would look bipartisan. 

Barack Obama was president from January, 2009* until January, 2017.  In what fucking universe did the Republican Party's unified, racist, obstruction of every single thing Obama tried to do "look bipartisan" in its totality?  In what fucking universe does Donald Trump oozing down the escalator and into the hearts of the GOP base qualify as heroically standing up to a "bad actor".   

Once again, in one sentence, Todd simply erases the inconvenience part.   

TODD:  And and this is where ... I don't know if this is a leadership problem. It's, y'know, I am ... I am exhausted from pointing fingers somewhere. Oh, it's here, it's here,  it's here. When really, it's all of us, right? 

There's that deep, well-reasoned, fact-based political analysis for which NBC News shelled out big bucks.  

TODD:  And look, I... I accept the premise that there are folks on the left who say, "Yeah, we have our extremists, but we think those guys are worse." And I accept the premise that on the right they say, "We may have our extremists, but those guys are worse."

This, right here -- the media' pathological obsession with providing "Both Sides Do It" political cover for the worst people in America and an all-purpose excuse for the laziest and most cowardly people in America -- is the real reason American politics is fucked.  

But at least those battling scientists can finally move on with their their lives now that the question of  which-came-first has been settled.

Chuck Todd continues:

TODD:   Like take the Matthew Dowd comment. Okay. Terrible thing that he said. What do we think? 125,000 people saw it in real time. It gets amplified on social media, right?

First, as much as it pains me to admit, what Matthew Dowd said wasn't terrible.  At all.  And second, it was Fox News that amplified it... just as they have been originating and amplifying the most grotesque slander during all those halcyon decades of "bad actor" policing and "respectful", "conventional" debate.

And now, let's remove the thing I asked you to pin 527 paragraphs ago and get back to the issue Mr. Pfingsten's fellow WMAY talking heads, Brian Kilmeade and Clay Travis.  

Yes, that Brian Kilmeade:

'Just Kill 'Em': Fox Host Makes Shocking Comment On Homeless People

“Fox and Friends” co-host Brian Kilmeade suggested this week that homeless people suffering from mental health issues who refuse help should simply be killed...

“Or uh, involuntary lethal injection. Or something,” he said. “Just kill ’em.”

The other two hosts barely react to his remark before continuing their discussion.

WMAY syndicated radio host and Fox News employee, Brian Kilmeade, got to keep his Fox News gig and his WMAY gig after casually suggesting on live television that the homeless should be mass murdered, while Matthew Dowd was crucified by Fox News and fired from his MSNBC gig even after apologizing profusely for what were a few anodyne comments about violent language.   

Which brings it to that other WMAY syndicated radio host, Clay Travis and his violent, unhinged rant about Liberals following the killing of Charlie Kirk.  From Crooks & Liars:

Fox News Contributor Clay Travis  Should Be Fired

The right can say and do anything and are not allowed to be criticized for it.

Clay Travis, the host of Outkick, and a Fox News contributor went a scorched earth to Sean Hannity on the left after the Charlie Kirk shooting and received no push back from Fox News for his antics.

The incendiary rhetoric by most of the right-wing talk shows, media outlets, and podcasters is a staple of the institutions, and they make their living by vilifying the left with eliminationism.

They are quick to vilify anyone else who correctly describes the actions some of them take, as well as their political leaders, and they look for events to pile on.

Matthew Dowd was fired by MSNBC, where is Fox News' accountability?

Where's the accountability, WMAY?

Chuck Todd again:

TODD:   You know, there was a time where we punished a politician that didn't try to unify the country, right? It was just that's bad politics.

By my calculations, Todd had now used up an entire Olympic swimming pool's-worth of Kilz and White-Out to blot out the actual history of the Actual Republican party.  But he's not done yet, because 

the stupidest, most craven and most sinister comment of all was buried inside this slab of mildewed nonsense:

TODD:   And that's what frankly both sides do this. They grab the nubbest, nuttiest thing somebody says in one of these somewhere online and says, grabs it, isolates it, right? Gets it to take off and go viral and say that's all of them, right? This person, it was representative of this entire community, right? And you know, the right has been arguing that this has been happening way too often in ... in mainstream media. And I know exactly. And my answer is yes, you're correct. But the answer isn't to do it that that there should be sort of mutual assured destruction, right? 

At a stroke, Todd has not only told the MAGA mob that, yes, one of their most cherished delusions is real -- that there is a Giant Liberal Media Conspiracy plotting against them -- but that the mainstream media is in on it!  Also, hey asshole, you are the mainstream media.

What are the odds that the next time the Crooked Media lads --

-- or the Bulwark crew -- 

-- welcome Chuck Todd back onto their podcast like a long lost lodge brother, his embarrassing WMAY wallow in the Both Siderist shitpile will be politely forgotten or ignored by the hosts. 

 *  Thanks to Alert Reader Bruce for catching my temporal error.

I Am The Liberal Media

Out Here in the Real World There Are Hundreds of Savvy, Sharp, Eloquent Liberal Voices Who Have Been Right All Along

But instead of any of them, ever, (because they might track in big, muddy, inconvenient footprints from the Before Time) the flagship Bulwark podcast has decided to continue the Chuck Todd Reputation Rehabilitation Project.  

Because some things never change.

Because the arc of the media Universe always bends towards the Chuck Todds of the world.

Because there continues to be a Club.

And we continue to not be in it.

I Am The Liberal Media

The Circle (Jerk) of (Pundit) Life

As you know, over the past few weeks the Pod Save lads have loaned out their increasingly Third Way/Centrist credibility to help rehabilitate Chuck Todd's reputation and give Jake Tapper an open mike to pimp his Biden bashing book.  

And now Savvy-o, the Muse of the Punditocracy, has closed that circle by putting Tapper and Todd together so they could take turns holding down Joe Biden's good name while the speculating wildly about all the terrible things they imagine he might have done. 

Must be a great relief to both Tapper and Todd to finally be able to shed the "respected journalist" fig leaves they were forced to wear for so long and come fully out as the smarmy, bitter hacks some of us have always known they were underneath.  

I Am The Liberal Media

Somehow, Schmidt Returned

I am struggling to remain in Jim Acosta's corner, but the man is making it difficult.  For example, this is what he pooped into my email inbox yesterday.

Steve Schmidt?  

Really?  

The guy who had torched his own career and stabbed his supporters in the back often enough that even I once thought he had finally, irrevocably used up the last of his Rolodex friends and cast himself out of The Club?    Burned enough bridges so that such as this could never happen again?  From Steve Schmidt: The Only Surprise Is That Anyone Is Surprised

...So how does Schmidt do it?  Continue to be trusted as a credible ally despite practically screaming that he isn't?

Because, to slightly misquote Ned Beatty in Network, "He's on television dummy."  

In case you hadn't noticed, MSNBC has built an entire industry out of rehabilitating the reputations of Republican scoundrels, and all it takes for Schmidt to win his way back into the hearts of credulous Liberals is for Chris Hayes to officially welcome him back, or Joe Scarborough to put him back in the lineup, or Nicole Wallace to put her arm around her old pal Steve and reintroduce him to the audience as one of the good guys. 

Which is exactly what I predicted would happen during Schmidt's first fuck-my-principles cash grab back in February of 2019.

Thank you your Honor, and ladies and gentlemen of the jury.  I would say that I await your swift and just verdict, but I think we all know exactly what that verdict will be.  After taking Howard Schultz for every nickel he can, sooner rather than later Mr, Schmidt will be welcomed back into the loving and lucrative bosom of the Insider's Club.

Because, as I may have mentioned once or twice, the Insider's Club has only two rules:

There's a Club.

You are not in it.

And, right on time, it is exactly what happened eight months later.  

WATCH: Steve Schmidt returns to MSNBC https://t.co/auvb7C6zKz #inners

— All In with Chris Hayes (@allinwithchris) October 19, 2019

...

But of course, I was wrong.  Because the Legacy Media Insider Club is a house of many doors.  Many windows.  Many chimneys down which one can shimmy.   And many adjacent bungalows where marginal Club member can live and work until the are fully rehabilitated.

You and I aren't in the Club and never shall be because... we're not in it.  Seems like a tautology, right?  But it's the straight dope:  to be in the Club you have to have been in the Club.  

And although his membership card is torn and tarnished, I shall never again doubt that Schmidt is in the fucking Club.  Like the song says:

When you’re a Schmidt

You’re the top cat in town

You’re the gold-medal kid

With the heavyweight crown!

When you’re a Schmidt

You’re the swingin’est thing

Little boy, you’re a man;

Little man, you’re a king!

So, when given the chance to absorb some of Jim Acosta's rapidly fading Good Guy Ally glow, no surprise Schmidt took it.  

But wait!  There's more!

I don't know if you're aware, but now that Chuck Todd is free of the need to pretend he's not a complete tool by means of the rote recitation of the Both Sides Do It mantra every Sunday on Meet the Press, he is now venting his spleen with abandon to anyone who will listen.  

How curdled and bitter has Todd become?  So curdled and bitter that he scored himself this Fox News headline.  From March 3, 2025

Chuck Todd says the 'mythology' of Joe Biden as a family man is 'all bulls---' 

 

'What he really was, was a craven political animal that was desperate,' Chuck Todd said of 46th president

Former NBC "Meet the Press" anchor Chuck Todd delivered a brutal opinion about former President Biden, calling him a "craven political animal" who was more concerned about his political career than his own family.

But wait!  There's more!

As you know, Todd quit his NBC gig earlier this year, ending his time there as America's most famous Guy Sticking His Head In The Sand and America's leading Both Sides Do It propagandist, and leaving behind this hilariously clueless headline at Entertainment Weekly:

Chuck Todd exits NBC News, shares dissatisfaction with industry: 'The media has a lot of work to do'

"It's a bottom line here: we can't stick our heads in the sand and we can't be propagandists."

Stop laughing.  It's not polite.

So, no longer encumbered by his NBC contract, what toilet did Todd choose at which to take his vicious little shit on Joe Biden?

If you guessed the Steve Schmidt podcast, award yourself 10 points!

Here now, a more complete snip from the Fox News story, with emphasis added:

Former NBC "Meet the Press" anchor Chuck Todd delivered a brutal opinion about former President Biden, calling him a "craven political animal" who was more concerned about his political career than his own family.

During an appearance Sunday on Lincoln Project co-founder Steve Schmidt's "The Warning" podcast, Todd delved into why the Democrats lost the 2024 election and what he perceives as the media's relationship with the second Trump administration.

Acosta lending Schmidt his own, rapidly evaporating credibility.

Todd using Schmidt to take cheap shots at Biden, and scoring them both a feature at Fox News.

No one should be surprised that rehabilitation of Steve Schmidt is, once again, well underway. 

Because like road work on the Dan Ryan expressway, it never really stops.  

I Am The Liberal Media

A Murderer's Row Of Legacy Media Garbage

I know what you're wondering.

You're wondering, "What it the plural form of 'status quo?"

I understand because this is the sort of question that keeps me up at night.  Fortunately I have access to The Google, and now the answer be told:

status quos or (rare) statuses quo or (rare, hypercorrect) stati quo

And given what you know about me, you know which option speaks to me. 

Ahem.

Within the legacy media there it not just one terrible status quo doctrine which must be defended at all costs.   There are multiple, terrible stati quo doctrines which must be defended.  Here are three of them, each from a legacy media thought leader.

1.  Liberals just don't understand.

It is an article of faith within the legacy political media that, whatever some Never Trump has just now figured out, it is the first time anyone anywhere has figured whatever-it-is out and it it now their solemn duty to use their huge media platform to explain it to the po' dump Liberal who have no clue.  

And so...

What Liberals Miss About the MAGA Movement

David French explores what keeps Trump’s followers hooked.

Sept. 19, 2024

I first started writing about the MAGA movement in late 2015. Like a lot of people, I didn’t initially take Trump seriously, but very quickly, I realized this was very serious and he was absolutely resonating. And so, I began talking to friends, to relatives. Why? What is it about Donald Trump that appeals to you so much? And that conversation has never really stopped for nine years.

I knew that MAGA was going to take this torch and carry it as far as it possibly could. And they did it in that particular way that MAGA interacts with the larger world, with this sense of gleeful transgression. They have fun being outrageous. They have fun being provocative. They like to “trigger the libs.” What MAGA is very good at doing is turning around back to its own people and saying, “See, we struck a nerve.” They’ll use words like, “If you’re taking flack, it means you’re over the target.” And so they use the backlash almost as proof that they’ve hit a nerve and all of this just creates an endless process of doubling down.

And one thing that I think that liberals tend to miss about the MAGA movement is they miss its underlying sense of community and its joy. So there is a strong sense of belonging within MAGA and they have a great time being MAGA...

This is the Tribe That Rubs This In Their Hair, about which I have been writing about since even before I made character actor and unhinged wingnut lunatic Nick Searcy cry like a little bitch and run away:

These are genuine charter members of the Tribe That Rubs Shit In Their Hair -- my shorthand for the Conservative mutual masturbation society whose lunacy grows exponentially more unhinged when excitedly puppy-piling their batshit nonsense among themselves -- who happily rub shit in their hair because everyone else in the club is doing it...

The key takeaway from David French is not that we silly, addlepated Liberals don't really understand what's going on inside the Republican party.  The key takeaway is that David French spent his entire adult life writing right-wing garbage for outfits like the National Review while turning a blind eye to what was going on inside his Republican party until it was far, far too late.  

I first started writing about the MAGA movement in late 2015. Like a lot of people, I didn’t initially take Trump seriously, but very quickly, I realized this was very serious 

But of course it's far too psychologically painful and professionally inconvenient for him to admit that the Left has actually be right about the Right all along.  So he just erases us and replaces us with imaginary Liberals who need to have all this complicated, grownup political stuff explained to them in little words.  

2.  Trump Hijacked The Modern Republican Party.

It is vitally important to virtually every legacy media Conserative influencer of the first water to continue to maintain the the Republican party was just fine until Trump showed up one day and, overnight, somehow mesmerized tens of millions of them into voting for him over and over again.  

Millions of pixels have been spilt by Liberal writers over the past decade (including your 'umbel scrivner) definitely proving over and over again that this is sheer bunkum.  That the rot at the heart of the GOP began long before Trump arrives.  That all of those now-shocked!shocked legacy media pundits were either blissfully oblivious to what was actually happening inside the GOP for decades , or were perfectly sanguine about it because building a party base of Fox-News addicted bigots and imbeciles was winning them elections.  Either way, those now-shocked!shocked legacy media pundits spent a whole lot of time and energy dismissing anyone who was speaking the truth about the GOP as crackpot alarmists...

...until that party base finally manifested its perfect avatar. Someone who spoke their hateful language, fully endorsed their grievances and paranoia, and shared their debased "values".  Donald Trump.  At which point those now-shocked!shocked legacy media pundits had to scramble for an explanation for the existence and persistence that not show them to have been wrong all along.  And they're still scrambling.

Take it away David Brooks on the PBS NewsHour (referring to Mark "I'm a Black Nazi" Robinson)

Brooks:  ...It's nastiness, and mind-boggling nastiness.

Well, what it says is the Republican Party used to be a normal party, which had the normal vetting procedures. Like, you were a College Republican, and then you got vetted by your local state assembly, and then — so you had a normal — like any industry, basically, that there's a whole series of structures that people who are just complete opportunists and degenerates, if I can use that word, don't pass through the system.

But that whole system was wiped away. And so, ever since the Trump era came in...

No, David.  That system was a fraud, and you and your various "respectable" employers were a deeply complicit it perpetrating that fraud on the American public for decades.

It's not a hijacking or a theft or a hostile takeover when the base of the party hands a madman the keys and begs him to take them wherever he wants.  

And finally...inevitably.  The big one.  

3.  Both Sides Do It (And Democrats Are Solely Responsible For Fixing Everything.)

Because Chuck Todd had been given the hook off the the Meet the Press set and replaced by the equally awful Kristin Welker, you may have been under the misapprehension that NBC had actually fired Chuck Todd fired for incompetence, or he had been sent update to play with other disgraced former network political anchors, or had suddenly been summoned back to his home planet for some reason.

 But no.  Chuck Todd is still NBC News' Chief Political Analyst, still cranks out a newsletter on a regular basis, and his wretched Both Siderist stank is still very much in evidence everywhere.  

For example, here, on NBC's very own website.  With emphasis added to aid you the reader.

Chuck Todd: What if we can't unite?

...Let’s be honest: The current level of political discourse is unsustainable for this democracy. Maybe it doesn’t break us this year, maybe not next. But unless we choose to rise above it, either by electing de-escalators rather than purveyors of zero-sum political pugilism or by demanding that the big tech companies stop creating algorithms...

De-escalators?  You mean like Barack Obama?  Hey Chuck, remind me again how the Right reacted to the election of Barack Obama.

Chuckles the Clown continues:

The problem with political discourse in America right now is that we are all stuck in a social media funhouse mirror booth. What we see isn’t what is, and how we’re seen isn’t who we are. And yet, here we are....

 "We"?  Who the fuck is this "We" you're talking about.

Chuckles continues:

And that brings me back to what happened over the weekend. Be honest with yourself — while the news was surprising Sunday, it sadly wasn’t very shocking. Spend 10 minutes doom-scrolling on your social media app of choice and you will be served up examples of outrage and demonization that can do one of two things: make you shake your head about the state of the country and leave the platform in disgust or anger you and get you to engage even more, usually by contributing wittingly or unwittingly to demonizing “the other side.”

And, yes, I’m being intentionally vague with these descriptions because this type of behavior isn’t limited to one set of partisans...

No, you're being intentionally vague because if you were clear and specific everyone could see how completely full of shit you are. 

Chuckles continues:

It’s why it’s hard to take seriously the outrage from some in Trump’s orbit that it’s the Democrats and their media allies who have created the more violent conditions in our political landscape. For every complaint the right surfaces about discourse it says could have been triggering, there is a slew of pugilistic personal attacks that Trump has made himself and directed at Americans by name, putting them in harm’s way.

But just because Trump started it doesn’t mean his opponents have the high moral ground when they single out him and some of his supporters for personal derision. I still want to live in a society where “two wrongs don’t make a right.”...

There it is. Chuckles' irredeemable corrupt statement of corporate media morality.  Of course, it's bad when terrible people do terrible things, but it is equally bad (maybe worse!) to say true things about those terrible people and the terrible things they are doing.  

Chuckles continues with a sermonette on Both Siderism worthy of David Fucking Brooks at his worst:

Sadly, so much of our political discourse features people rationalizing their bad behavior by claiming the other side is worse.

Who are these "people"?  Where do they live?  What, specifically, are they saying?  Are the numbers of these imaginary "people" actually equivalent on both sides?  Can Chuckles cite any actual examples of any of this at all?

Of course not.  Because would smack of "journalism" which, I am sure, doesn't appear anywhere in the job description of an NBC News' Chief Political Analyst.

Chuckles continues:

My friends on the left love to scream about both sides-isms and love to complain when some of us hold them to a higher standard than Trump.

First, Chuckles has no friends on the Left.  

Second, way to go team!  I know as a matter of fact that it has been readers of this blog and others, and listeners to the Professional Left Podcast, that have been the most tireless missionaries on social media spreading the Good News that Both Sides Don't.  

And you know what?  It worked!  The message of the Both Sides Don't movement has penetrated so deeply into enemy territory the NBC News' Chief Political Analyst now has to acknowledge that it exists and where it's coming from...before dismissing it with one of the weakest, most pusillanimous excuses I have ever heard.

But the party that promises a higher standard is asking to be judged by a higher standard. This doesn’t mean anyone is condoning the bad behavior of the other side, but it means that if you ask the voters to expect better, you should always behave better, period... 

This is goalpost-moving on a rocket sled.  Sure, Donald Trump is a degenerate, racist, rapist monster, and that's all really bad.  But if actually saying true things about Donald Trump and the Republican party is objectively worse because...reasons.

 I would never expect Chuckles to sit down on a panel with actual Liberals armed to the teeth with receipts.  He much too gutless for that.  But it would be hilarious to sit him down at a panel with, say, David French and David Brooks that is moderated by, say, me and watch these three legacy media stati quo crash with each other.  

After all, because Brooks pretends that Trump broke the Republican party, he feels free to refer to candidate vetting process as one that produces "opportunists and degenerates".  Candidates which don't just have skeletons in their closet, but whole "morgues in their closet."

David French says MAGA is  

...trashing our body politic. They’re wrecking, in many ways, the G.O.P., but they are having a good time and hey, the people they’re making mad, they don’t like them anyway.

And you might think for a minute that, well, wait, this can’t go on forever. Surely, surely the majority of Republicans, when they know they’ve been had, when they know these are lies, will stop paying attention to these memes. They’ll reject this method.

And the really sad answer is that the Republican response to Jan. 6 and the Big Lie showed us the tolerance that Republicans have for dishonesty and for lying if it is directed against their hated Democratic enemies. 

A lot of people are looking at these transparent lies, obvious falsehoods, baseless accusations, and saying, “How is this happening again? Why are we here again?” And one of the answers, quite frankly, is that MAGA has a lot of fun doing this. 

 (And not for nuthin', but my-oh-my you should hear what kind of salty language many prominent legacy media Never Trumpers use to accurately describe what is going on with the Republican party.  They almost sound like [checks notes] Liberal bloggers circa 2004!)

There is no way to describe the atrocities on the Right without describing them as atrocities, and there is no way to correctly characterize the villainy and depravity of those enacting and applauding those atrocities without describing them as depraved villains.  So how does Chuckles propose to square this circle? 

Well...he doesn't, because he doesn't give a shit about any of this.  His years laboring in the legacy media vineyards have taught him only one skill:  how to concoct what he believes to be excellent "gotcha" questions with which to trip up Democrats.

But to these tired eyes, it appears that, very slowly, at least some prominent Progressives/Liberals/Democrats are starting to figure out how not to get tripped up by Todd's absurd goalpost-moving, or Brooks' ridiculous revisionist history, or French's laughable idea that the actions and motives of Republicans need to be explained to the very same Liberals who were warning about the actions and motives of Republicans during all the years when David French was lying about it.

And it's so easy!

#1:  Fuck David French.

#2:  Fuck David Brooks.

And #3:  Fuck Chuck todd.

I Am The Liberal Media

One-Trick Pony Knows One Trick: A Chuck Todd Adventure

I'll bet some of you thought Chuck Todd had gone away for good.  Perhap, (in keeping with the headline of this post) you surmised that he'd been shipped off to the career glue factory. Or maybe sent upstate to a disgraced former NBC anchor farm, there to play happily in the sun all day long with Tom Brokaw. Matt Lauer, Brian Williams and David Gregory.

Nope.

In addition to being given a participation-trophy streaming things called "NBC News NOW" as part of his please-go-away package from COMCAST, Todd also retained the title of Chief Political Analyst for NBC News.  Which means that, like a Beltway super-rat, chewing his way through concrete and fighting the mighty currents trying to sweep him into professional obsolescence, Todd will still, from time to time, claw his way out of obscurity, back up the Beltway sewer pipe, then pop unexpectedly out of the NBC News toilet with another staggeringly Chuck Toddian opinion.  

Like today.  From NBC News (with no link, because fuck that guy, but also with a h/t to alert reader @ragonkforce1 for sending this my way).

Chuck Todd: Our broken judiciary

Analysis: Court reform proposals wouldn’t deal with the core problem: too many judges wearing red and blue robes rather than black ones.

Do I even need to go on?  Because I'm betting you know exactly how this shitty article plays out, possibly down to the paragraph where the razor-in-the-apple will inevitably be found.  

It's paragraph six.  

Right after categorically dismissing Democrat's anger over the naked corruption and malice of Clarence Thomas and Sam Alito as mere partisanship --

There’s no doubt this anger from the left over Thomas and, to a lesser extent, Justice Samuel Alito...

-- and the pausing just long enough to acknowledge that, well, yeah, Thomas and Alito are pretty fucking awful.  But we cannot tarry there, because the Both Sides Do It parade is about to begins!

From paragraph six:

But as much as ethical lapses are a problem, this isn’t why the judiciary appears broken to so many Americans. Remember, today’s judges are a product of our generation-long polarized wars of the Senate. The issue isn’t how judges behave in office; the issue appears to be the confirmation process itself.

The word "appears" is doing so much heaving lifting here I'm afraid it'll herniate several discs.  

Also Chuck Todd's pulled-out-of-thin-air assertion that somehow he knows the real reason "so many Americans"  think the judiciary is broken isn't because Republicans have been running a 50-year-long project to fuck the court up beyond repair is like a shot of vintage, triply-rectified David Brooks bullshittery circa 2010.

Then comes the parade.

If you are angry about the judiciary, remember whom to blame: the Senate leaders who hijacked the process...

Somewhere along the line, Senate leaders on both sides of the aisle...

And that rank partisanship may explain why the public’s views of the Supreme Court...

While senators love to blame the other party for politicizing the judiciary, the facts show that both parties have dirty hands...

Now, let’s go back to our founding and see what the framers expected...

 Lowering the threshold for confirmation from 60 votes to 50 votes certainly helped the Senate fill the vacant seats with their preferred partisan outcomes, but they created a polarized legal system...

And now we reach the point where where Todd completely disappears up his own poop chute and lands in Happy Bipartisan Gumball Land which bears no relationship to American political reality whatsoever.  

Now, you may wonder, “75 votes?!?! Are you out of your mind? Look at what happened to the Senate when the threshold was 60 votes — it basically ground Senate business to a halt.” 

Yes, it did. But here’s what the 75-vote threshold would trigger: a much different type of nominee from the executive branch. 

If you know going in that you need upward of half of the other party’s senators to get a nominee confirmed, then you would have incentives to find as neutral a nominee as possible...

You mean like Merrick Garland?

Some presidents would attempt to find moderates from their side of the aisle...

You mean like Merrick Garland?

What’s truly distressing is how few sitting senators think raising the threshold for confirmation is a good idea. They are so tied to the partisan outcome they expect from the judiciary that their own party activists have come to expect them to behave as partisan warriors when it comes to judges...

At this point Todd runs out of ways to say Both Sides Do It and turns to the subject of what a huge and terrible (and did I mention huge?) mistake it has been for the Harris campaign not to bend the knee to the Beltway media.

I know many Democrats have an allergy to all things Trump, but the one thing I thought more candidates would learn from his initial campaign in 2016 is that he viewed all media as good for him...

The point is that the Harris folks are going about this all wrong so far...

But here's the thing about Todd (and the advantage of being an OG blogger with a functional memory.)  The reason Todd was an ideal anchor for Meet the Press is that he is completely amoral.  A perfect windsock.  Whichever way the breeze is blowing today, that's the direction you'll find Chuck Todd pointing.

For instance, all the way back in July of 2021, Chuck was interviewed by The Verge magazine.  The subject of the interview was media platforms, streaming service, etc. but then the interviewer went a little deeper, and that's then this happened.  This is all Chuck Todd in The Verge back in 2021 with my emphasis added.

So you have to be fair and have an open mind. Where we did get lost in this, and this sort of happened to mainstream media in particular, is that we did let Republican critics get in our heads, right?

The Republicans have been running on, “There’s a liberal bias in the media.” And talk about, if you say something long enough, there are liberals who say there’s a liberal bias in the media when you see polling now...

The point is, if you say it enough, a lot of people believe it. This has been a 45-year campaign. I mean, Roger Ailes and Pat Buchanan were Nixon guys and basically blamed the media for Watergate. And it’s been a sustained campaign. And Roger Ailes basically built an entire media empire based on this premise that he created during the Nixon era.

We should have fought back better in the mainstream media. We shouldn’t [have] accepted the premise that there was liberal bias. We should have defended. I hear the attacks on fact checkers where they “fact-check Republicans six times more than they fact-check Democrats.” Yeah. Perhaps the Republicans are being factually incorrect more often than the Democrats.

We ended up in this both-sides trope. We bought into the idea that, oh my God, we’re perceived as having a liberal bias. And I think for particularly the first decade of the century, I’d say mainstream media overcorrected. And we bought into the Fox motto of “balance.” And it’s like, Jesus, there’s no balance, they need the truth. There’s fairness, that’s different than balance. And so in that sense, this is why we’re in this defensive posture today.

Jump forward three years and all of has been erased from the memory of man.  Instead you have Todd right back in his Both Sides Do It bag, lamenting that, golly!, Harris campaign is acting like the Beltway media is not to be trusted!

And the degree to which Todd is willing to casually bulldoze down the memory hole the actual reality of the 2016 campaign -- especially the way he and his entire profession burned what little was left of their professional credibility to the ground relentless propping Trump up and tearing Hillary down so they could have the horserace they desperately wanted -- makes me wonder how soon we can expect to see Chuck Todd being rolled out as Fox News' latest Big Name hire.

No Half Measures

Semi-Retired Elite Media Clown Dreams Up One More Way To Embarrass Himself

Biden’s anger at “elites” is a bit misplaced. Without the “elites,” he would have had a serious primary foe. Without the “elites,” the No Labels effort would have a compelling ticket. Arguably, it’s the “elites” who put too much faith in Biden that got the Dems in this position.

— Chuck Todd (@chucktodd) July 8, 2024

It's getting to be long past time for Chuckles to fully-retire.

Maybe consider getting shut of all his NBC perversions altogether and take up a hobby.

Something new and challenging, that he's never tried before.

Like coding.

Or woodworking.

Or journalism.  

I Am The Liberal Media

The Revelation According to Chuck

[Note:  This post more or less the content of our early edition the Pro Left Podcast which dropped yesterday.  I was half way through putting this together when Blue Gal and I decided we really should podcast about this very fertile subject ASAP.  So if you've already listened to our podcast, please feel free to skip this...and/or just scroll straight to the bottom and drop much coin in the tip jar :-)  As always, thank you for your support.]

As most of you know, for the better part of two decades I ran a feature on this blog called "Sunday Morning Comin' Down" which was a weekly rundown of how America's Most Prestigious Political Talk Shows were failing us.  

And over time I gradually tapered off because, let's face it, after a while it was just poking a dead possum with a stick.  It's not playing.  It's really dead.  And it's starting to smell so...

But every now and then something weird happens.  Something which, to the uninitiated, can appear as though the Beltway media has Learned a Lesson.  That the now-long-dead possum is somehow staggering back to its feet.  

I can assure you this is never the case.  

Instead, what you are seeing when this happens is a kind of media post-mortem flatulence: the decomposing husk of the media twitching and farting as if there were something "journalistic-y" still going on in there.  And that's what happened this week, on Meet the Press, that's got everyone's panties in a bunch.

But first, let's take a step back so that we all understand what we're talking about.

Meet the Press is a weekly network broadcast teevee show that is aired by NBC.

NBC is a subsidiary of NBCUniversal News Group.

NBCUniversal News Group. is a subsidiary of NBCUniversal Media Group.

NBCUniversal Media Group is the television and stream division of NBCUniversal Media, LLC. 

NBCUniversal Media, LLC. is a subsidiary of Comcast.

Which, as every 30 Rock fan knows, is owned by Sheinhardt Wigs.

Jack Donaghy breaks it all down here:

All of which is to say that NBC/Comcast/Whatever is a Very Large corporation, and all those people you see in front of NBC cameras -- every one of them -- are merely employees of that Very Large Corporation.  

That Very Large Corporation sells a lot of different products and services.  Cloud computing.  Cybersecurity.  In-home fiber optics.  And way, way down that list are teevee shows.  And way, way down the list of teevee shows is Meet the Press, which many people mistake for a news show that does journalism, but it isn't.  It is a news simulacra.  As Velveeta is technically not real cheese, but rather, a "processed cheese product", Meet the Press is not "news" but rather a "synthetic news-like product".  

Every week, on Meet the Press, various well-paid performers put on costumes and stage a news-like performance.  What historian Thomas Zimmer refers to as "neutrality theater".

Like a stage play or puppet show: everyone knows their role and plays their part.  And in between segments, various advertisers pay NBC/Comcast/Whatever a Very Large sum of money to run ads for Skyrizi and reverse mortgages.  That's how everyone involved in the project gets paid.  

So, in this marketplace, what exactly is being sold and to whom?  Is news the product?  Nope.  Are  Skyrizi and reverse mortgages the product?  Nope?

You are the product.  Your attention.  Your eyeballs.  You the audience are being sold to the advertisers. Ergo, the bigger the audience, the bigger the payday.  

Conversely, the smaller the audience, the smaller the payday.  This is why a 30-second Super Bowl ad costs seven million dollars, and an ad for a local body shop on local teevee costs nine dollars and a Whitman's Sampler box of chocolate.

From The Washington Post, September 18, 2022:

Can the Sunday morning talk show be saved?
After declining ratings and an exodus of VIP guests, these Washington institutions are looking for ways to tweak an old format

...

“Trump established the reality that he could address a very large audience very quickly just by using his thumbs alone” on Twitter, says Mark Lukasiewicz, a former ABC and NBC News executive who is now dean of Hofstra University’s communication school. “The Sunday shows are no longer the gatekeepers for political conversations on TV. They were born at a time when politicians needed TV to reach their audience. That’s far less true today.”

...

The number of younger viewers — the 25-54 age group valued highly by advertisers — has dropped by one-third, weakening the shows’ financial viability.

...

“Fox News Sunday” and “Meet the Press,” which each lost about a quarter of their audience over the past four years, have both been doing some tinkering, too.

So media corporations like NBC/Comcast/Whatever try out all kinds of bad ideas, because they're not in the journalism business or the democracy business.  They're in maximizing advertising profits in a shrinking market business.

Swap out the words "client" and "creative" and swap in "democracy" and "journalism" and Mad Men's Duck Phillips has it just about right.  

And if you're in the business of maximizing profits in a shrinking market for synthetic news-like products, and the market for right wing garbage is already saturated, and your network executives just plain hate the Left with the heat of 1000 suns, what is there left to exploit but a non-existence Center, where Conservatives are scattered around here and there like throw pillows to let wingnuts know they're being heard...and there are enough pureblood Both Siderists around wringing their hands about The Extremes on Both Sides to make the cowards in the middle feel safe.

And what about the Left?  Fuck the Left!  Have I mentioned that network executives hate Liberals with the heat of 1000 suns?  So instead of putting on Liberals to talk about the long, ugly trajectory of the GOP that led them from Nixon to Trump, they repurpose a tiny handful of Republicans who have been run out of the party over the last few years.  Instead of Digby, Sam Seder, David Pakman, Hal Sparks and Blue Gal, you get Charlie Sykes, Tom Nichols, Bill Kristol, Amanda Carpenter and Matthew Dowd...all with their incredibly inconvenient pasts washed simon-pure by the narcotic magic of teevee and the amnesia of the general public.

And it's working.

This is from me, 1000 internet years ago:

Donald Trump exists to normalize Bill Kristol. After Trump, cable news "debates" will be between Charlie Sykes/Rick Wilson/National Review on one side, Eric Bolling/Hugh Hewitt/Breitbart on the other, "moderated" by Joe Scarborough. Liberals will vanish altogether.

— Driftglass, Guardian of Inconvenient History (@Mr_Electrico) November 15, 2018

So who's to blame?  

Frankly, the audience is to blame.  Because NBC/Comcast/Whatever does this shit all the time, and there are never really any consequences.    However fondly the masses may recall Tim Russert, he was bad enough that Meet the Press was Dick Cheney's prefered network for spreading lies and propaganda.  When Russert died, NBC put David Gregory in the big chair, and he was fucking awful.  

At the end of his run they replaced him with Chuck Todd, who was worse in exactly the same way.  

After eight years of Todd, they replaced him with Kristen Welker, who was worse still, also in exactly the same way.   They threw a huge bag of money at Megyn Kelly, who bombed, but got to keep the money.

I'm now going to repeat the phrase "they learned nothing" several times as a head-fake because it isn't strictly true, but bear with me.

Over at little brother network MSNBC, am I the only one who remembers the failed "Too Far Right" campaign, from which MSNBC learned nothing.

Brian William came and went, and they learned nothing.

Mark Halperin came and went, and they learned nothing.

Chris Matthews came and went, and they learned nothing.

Steve Schmidt came and went...and came and went..and came and went, and they learned nothing.

They gave Hugh Hewitt his own show, and it bombed. Hewitt came and went, and they learned nothing.

They gave Greta Van Susteren her own show, and even had network superstar Rachel Maddow push the hell out of it.  It bombed.  Van Susteren came and went, and they learned nothing.

Except, they did learn something.  They learned how passive and docile their core audience is over the long haul.  You can make a huge mistake -- piss on their leg and call it a warm spring rain -- and they'll beef loudly for a little while, but in the end they'll come back, and their Big Mad will fade away.

After all...where else are they gonna go?  To the blogs?  To the radio?   To Democracy Now!  Blog are dead.  Liberal radio is dead.  And DemocracyNow is somewhere north of station 978 if your cable company carries it at all.

Face it...

And now, for a mere 300K, they've picked up Ronna McDaniel.  For NBC/Comcast/Whatever, that's fire sale pricing.  That's literally 1/100th of the price they paid for the Megyn Kelly fiasco.  Very low risk, with a a decent potential upside.  Just like that other former-RNC chair they picked up on the cheap, Michael Steele.  Now they'd have a matched set, and can't you just imagine the boozy corporate pitch meeting where everyone thought this was a genius idea!  

After all, outside of a few gripes from nobody Liberal bloggers and podcasters , MSNBC audiences have been nice and pliable when it comes to the colonizing of the network with former Republicans.  Michael Steele is still a completely amoral grifter and a Republican and remains a reliable Both Siderist, but where he was once "WTF is Michael Steele doing on my Liberal TV?" , now he's a Hero of the Resistance.  Not long ago, Bloody Bill Kristol was "the wrongest man in America" according to MSNBC superstar Rachel Maddow.  Now Maddow is semi-retired from MSNBC, and Kristol is the beloved, kooky uncle who drops by every now and then to trash Trump, yuck it up with rapper Fat Joe and talk about the good old days.

But this weekend, when NBC rolled out it's newest addition -- Ronna McDaniel -- things took a turn.  

Oh my yes they did.

First came the rollout with this note to network staff by NBC News senior vice president of politics Carrie Budoff-Brown on Friday:

“It couldn’t be a more important moment to have a voice like Ronna’s on the team.  She will contribute her expert insight and analysis on American politics and the 2024 election across all NBC News platforms.

“As we gear up for the longest general election season in recent memory, she will support our leading coverage by providing an insider’s perspective on national politics and on the future of the Republican Party — which she led through some of the most turbulent and challenging moments in political history.”

This meant that Welker's already ill-advised interview of McDaniel on Meet the Press was no longer an interview of the former RNC chair, but an interview with Welker's newest colleague!  And as we know, one of the Iron Rules of the Beltway media is thou shalt not talk shit about thy colleagues at the same company.  

Then came the blowback, which  blew in from every direction.

From Vanity Fair, two days after the announcement:

Ronna McDaniel Won’t Be Appearing on MSNBC: Report

Intense internal backlash has followed NBC News' hiring of the former RNC chair as political analyst.

Just days after NBC News announced it was hiring Ronna McDaniel as a political analyst, MSNBC’s President, Rashida Jones, told employees that the former Republican National Committee chairwoman won’t be contributing on air to the cable network, The Wall Street Journal reported Saturday.

The decision to hire McDaniel was met with intense public backlash, leading to her resignation in February as the head of the GOP. Critics pointed to her close ties to Trump and her behind-the-scenes role in his attempt to overturn the 2020 election.

...

The WSJ reported that “a number of MSNBC anchors and producers have voiced concern internally” about the hire. Some current and former contributors and employees have also gone public. On Friday, MSNBC columnist Marisa Kabas posted on social media a screenshot of an email she sent to Brown, in which she encouraged her to “reconsider” the hire. “As columnists, we are held to strict standards of factuality and truth, and are expected to have a fundamental understanding of our democracy,” she wrote. “McDaniel has proven time and again that she adheres to none of those values.”

And then perhaps someone high up the food chain -- presumably higher up than NBC News senior vice president of politics Carrie Budoff-Brown -- sent Chuck Todd in to do damage control, or maybe he took it upon himself.  (h/t Crooks & Liars): 

And while the uninitiated saw this as a moment of high drama -- Chuck Todd re-entering the arena to defend Truth, Journalism and the Meet the Press way -- to those of us in the business, this was a moment of high comedy.  

During his tenure at Meet the Press, Chuck Todd never had any qualms about platforming Republican liars and lunatics who Todd knew were liars and lunatics.   And this has always been the transparently pathetic thing about Todd.   He is forever oscillating between grand pronouncement about the High Principles of Journalism, and then, on a different day with a different audience, breaking down the ugly realities of keeping NBC's synthetic news product profitable.  

In a July 2021 interview in The Verge magazine,  Todd explains that he "[doesn't]ever want to be in the access game" while bemoaning the fact that "the access game is paying a lot of bills in the social media influencer and cable news space."

And yet here he is in 2014 as the newly-minted host of Meet the Press explaining that he knows full well that without playing the access game, he'd be out of a job.

And here is a link to Chuck Todd's almost-lost-to-history appearance on The Moment with Brian Koppelman making it perfectly clear he knows what business he's in.  Going into even greater detail about how it is definitely not his job to irritate his guests by letting his audience know when they're flatly lying or insane even when he knows for a fact that they are.  As I said back in 2015 when I was the only person writing about this interview (and h/t again to Alert Reader Walt for pointing me to it):..

[Todd] does go so far as to say (starting at around the 11:00 minute mark) that he understands that every week elected asshats come on his show and lie to his face.

And that our politics has become a game of pandering to the "idiots" and that that is why the public is cynical.

And that all core truths about the catastrophe our politics has become are perfectly well known to everyone in The Club, but are only ever whispered about off the record. Because, as Mr. Todd confesses (at around the 18:15 mark), he is a creature of The Business of Show. A clown, in the employ of corporate executives whose faces we will never see and whose names will never be mentioned, but who make it clear to Mr. Todd that his show is all about gettin' them ratings, and fuck the substance. 

It is also kinda hilarious to hear the host of the most influential political show on teevee hoping (starting at around the 25:00 mark) that somehow, someday, maybe the Millennials with their Twitters and their Instagrams and suchlike will start demanding that politicians be on the record all the time, and then something something a big change might happen.

So what was Todd doing back on Meet the Press on Sunday?   He was there to do brand damage control.  Dispatched, presumably, from someone higher up the food chain than NBC News senior vice president of politics Carrie Budoff-Brown.

Because someone, somewhere fucked up badly, and that fuck up threatened to at least temporarily snap the audience out of its media somnambulism.  A minute ago they had seen caping for Donald Trump, groveling for his approval, and now here she was, a member of the NBC family?  Cloaked in the tattered remnants of Meet the Press' credibility?   

What the Hell, man!?

Of course, other people -- terrible people -- have different and terrible opinions:

The professional Republican mercenary, Frank Luntz thinks

 "Ronna McDaniel has an insider’s perspective we all would benefit from.  Instead of trying to silence her, we should be listening intently for all we can learn.  I listen to people I disagree with all the time.  It’s not an endorsement, it’s an opportunity to learn."

And  Greta Van Susteren, formerly of Fox, formerly of the failed MSNBC "Greta is Great" ad campaign", and who is now one of the walking media dead on NewsMax believes:

Chuck Todd does not have to agree with Ronna…but he should not disrespect that audience and only allow them to hear what HE wants them to hear; that is not journalism (that is Russia TV);the viewers are smart, they don’t need to have Chuck Todd screen what they hear.

So was hiring a Very Big Liar like Ronna McDaniel NBC's very big mistake?

Oh my goodness no.  Haven't you been paying attention?

NBC's very big mistake was simply bringing her to market too soon.   She was seriously underripe and needed to age in the oak barrel of occasional, brief, softball appearances before she was moved up to the bigs.

After all, former-RNC chair Michael Steele groveled just as hard for Rush Limbaugh's approval as McDaniel groveled for Trump's.  While he was running the Republican party, Steele told outrageous lies about the Democratic Party and the sitting Democratic president, including blaming the launching of the Afghanistan war on Barack Obama.  And Steele had no problem being hired to front for the racist Republican party.  By the end, he had humiliated himself so thoroughly that he stopped showing up to do his act on The Daily Show, thus launching the career of Puppet Michael Steele. 

But network executives used to understand that, if you want to get an audience to swallow something tainted and corrupt, you have to start by feeding it to them in small, sugar-coated bites.  First, they appear a few times as the sadder-but-wiser man or woman who, despite having spent their entire adult lives building the Republican monster machine, somehow never noticed and never really knew what was going on.  Who was shocked!shocked! when they only recently discovered what those Republicans were really up to!  

Have 'em talk about the Party of Lincoln.  Have 'em pine for Reagan.  Have 'em quote William Buckley.   Then, after the primer has been applied, move them onto the paint shop for full rebranding.  Have 'em shake their fist and stomp their foot and be indignant.  Maybe have them write a breathless book about all the terrible things they only recently learned -- things Liberals have been writing about for decades -- then promote the hell out of that book until it hits the Time's best seller list.  Then bring them back on for longer segments as a "New York Times Best Selling Author". 

Get 'em on Morning Joe and Nicole Wallace and the Today Show.  When they launch their own media company, adopt it as a virtual NBC subsidiary.  Pour tens of millions on free advertising in their enterprises...and then bring them back on for even longer segments as the founders or editors or publishers of these new things you helped them create.

And make sure, at every step along the way, they all remember to reinforce their overall Beltway media credibility by taking regular shots are The Extremes on Both Sides.  Sure, Trump is a monster, but what about campus speech codes?  Sure the Republican party is now a fascist shithole, but what about Liberals being so dismissive of their totally legitimate fears of some trans high school kid making the swim team?  

The Alert Viewer could not have failed to notice that, seated across from Todd on panel on Sunday was unreconstructed Iraq War huckster, Stephen Hayes, who has written a long and thoroughly perverse attempt to perform CPR on the rotting corpse of the Both Sides Do It lie.  

You see, both Biden and Trump are equally terrible choices.

We covered this a week ago on The Professional Left podcast, but in case you are unfamiliar, Hayes is one of the many Bush regime stooges in the media whose careers should have died once the debacle in Iraq could no longer be covered up and the Bush administration effectively collapsed.  

In 2004, Gideon Rose, editor of Foreign Affairs, described Hayes as "most indefatigable proponent of the Iraq-Al Qaeda link outside the [George W. Bush] administration."   In 2008, Spencer Ackerman characterized Hayes as one of the most effective amplifiers of the Bush administration's Iraq War claims about an Iraq-Al Qaeda link.

He wrote an entire book on the subject.

But, as with all the other Conservative propagandists who suddenly found themselves very much on the wrong side of history…nothing happened.   All the Bush administration's most ardent flaks, and all of their mainstream media collaborators. just shrugged it off and moved on to the next thing.    

And for Mr. Hayes, the next thing was the New York Post, Washington Times, Salon.com, National Review, and Reason. He has been a commentator on CNN, The McLaughlin Group, Fox News Channel, MSNBC, CNBC, and C-SPAN.

Hayes took over The Weekly Standard for a while, until the Trump team killed it.  Then he lingered far too long at Fox News for anyone with any sense of decency.  Then, since the wingnut welfare trough never goes dry and there is always funding available for these goofs to start their   next thing, he "along with Jonah Goldberg and Toby Stock, formed the conservative media company, The Dispatch."

And, just like Ronna McDaniel, Hayes was also hired by NBC as a "contributor across all our platforms".

So of course, now that he has been rehabilitated into a respectable Beltway stalwart, he’s has written  long, whining essay on Our Terrible Choices!!!

In Steele's case, the rebranding began in 2015.  From The Week, January 8, 2015

Michael Steele joins MSNBC: A 'sign of the apocalypse'?

The former chair of the Republican National Committee delights fans of his "sassy" style by signing on as an analyst at the left-leaning news network

He did the contributor thing for a few years, then began substitute hosting, and then, almost exactly nine years later:

From The Hollywood Reporter,  January 9, 2024

Behind MSNBC’s New Weekend Morning Show Revamp

Alicia Menendez, Symone Sanders-Townsend and Michael Steele talk to THR about their new morning program.

Small, sugar-coated bites of poison and the slow, steady erasure of the past is what got Steele from being a has-been punchline on The Daily Show to a full-time MSNBC employee and weekend co-host of his own show.  

And that was NBC's mistake with McDaniel: rushing to get the audience to swallow a whole bottle of cyanide all at once.

I Am The Liberal Media