NBC expects viewers to be excited by the news that Chuck Todd will taking over Meet The Press, but it turns out that NBC wasn’t even all that excited about the idea of Todd replacing David Gregory.
In the middle of Politico’s gushing story about Chuck Todd taking over Meet The Press there was one nugget of reality:
A national audience outside the Beltway, disenchanted with both politics and appointment viewing, will take more convincing.
In fact, even Todd’s bosses needed to be persuaded. Deborah Turness, the president of NBC News, was lukewarm on him, sources at the network said. Disappointed by the program’s poor ratings under host David Gregory, she had entertained all manner of revisions: Moving the show to New York and handing it over to a more affable, nonpolitical personality like Savannah Guthrie, the co-host of the “Today” show; changing the show’s name; perhaps even canceling it and starting over. That Turness was considering such diverse and radical options right up until the end — while Gregory was left to twist in the wind, enduring an onslaught of criticism and negative press — shows just how uncertain she was about the appropriate solution.
In the end, Turness decided to double-down on the formula that had made “Meet the Press” an institution: a Washington-based pure politics program moderated by a veteran political reporter.
What we are to make of this is that Deborah Turness didn’t have the courage to change Meet The Press radically like she wanted to, so the boss settled on blaming David Gregory for everything and replacing him with Chuck Todd. The Beltway types are comparing Todd to Tim Russert, but the new moderator of Meet The Press is going to have to change his style to belong in Russert category.
This is the same Chuck Todd who is September 2013 argued that it is not his job to challenge Republican lies. If this is will be his approach to Meet The Press, nothing much will change. It appears that by adding Todd and beefing Andrea Mitchell’s role on the show, NBC News is going to heavy on Beltway journalists. Of course, these same D.C. journalists are a big part of the reason why so many Americans don’t trust the mainstream press.
David Gregory got six awful years before he was shown the door, so it is a pretty safe bet that Chuck Todd has a very long leash. Except for the Beltway media types, nobody seems very excited by the news that Todd is taking over Meet The Press. Chuck Todd may love politics, but unless he can challenge the people that he is interviewing, he will end up faring about as well as David Gregory did.
If NBC wasn’t excited about Chuck Todd, the network shouldn’t be surprised to learn that viewers feel the same way.
Awards and Professional Memberships
Member of the Society of Professional Journalists and The American Political Science Association
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