In an interview to promote his Meet the Press special on the “Weaponization of Disinformation” on December 29, Chuck Todd spoke to… Rolling Stone. Oh, the irony.
It gets worse. Joining Todd for his special are “Marty Baron, executive editor of The Washington Post; Dean Baquet, executive editor of The New York Times; The New Yorker’s Masha Gessen; and former U.S. ambassador to Russia Michael McFaul.” You may recall that Baquet was the editor that called an emergency meeting and discussed how it was imperative that the coverage of President Trump included the requisite anti-Trump bias after inadvertently saying something nice about Trump in a headline.
That’s a stellar group that Chuck Todd has gathered together to discuss disinformation, right? Somehow I have a feeling that he’s going to focus not on their own bias but rather, suggest that it’s “those damned Republicans” that are pushing disinformation.
The opening of the Rolling Stone article already pushes disinformation — stating that Sen. John Kennedy(R-LA) was suggesting that Ukraine and not Russia interfered in the 2016 election; citing Kellyanne Conway’s “alternative facts” quip; and suggesting that Sen. Ted Cruz(R-TX) was spreading Russian propaganda. But then, would you expect anything less from Rolling Stone who published a thinly-sourced gang-rape hoax at the University of Virginia? Research isn’t exactly Rolling Stone‘s forte.
The Meet the Press anchor says that he decided to focus on the spread of disinformation after the Ukraine story broke — he was shocked about the misinformation about Joe Biden that the Trump campaign was spreading on social media.
The Media(D) led by journos like Chuck Todd seem to want to treat election interference as a zero-sum game where they insist that it was the Russians and not the Ukrainians who attempted to interfere in the election. Senators Kennedy and Cruz are saying — why not both? Two things can be true at once.
At the heart of the claim of Ukraine interference is a rather thorough Politico article by Kenneth Vogel and David Stern saying that Ukraine worked with the Hillary campaign against Donald Trump by questioning his fitness for office, sharing incriminating information on Paul Manafort, and helping the DNC dig up dirt on Trump and his associates.
Vogel now writes for the New York Times and stands by his 2017 reporting.
But that’s not enough for Chuck Todd. He says that the right has an “incentive” to spread false information.
So I do think one of the things that I want to explore on this is the incentive structure. One of the things we don’t fully appreciate in mainstream media on these attacks is that it’s become fun to attack the press, if that makes sense, on the right. It doesn’t matter if we’re right or wrong, attack them anyway.
This is, to me, the greater challenge we have, which is that pretending the media is a liar or fake news and all this stuff, is sport. Trump has turned this into sport. People that are the loudest chanters of fake news and accusatory of us are the ones who, under a lie detector, would probably take our word over any word they’ve heard from the other side on whether something was poisonous or not. Hannity says drink it, and so-and-so says don’t. Who do you trust? So I do think that is something that this sort of cheering on falsehoods for sport. Wow, have we gone off the rails on the right side of the conversation that’s taking place.
Tell me more, Chuck.
The criticism of the partisan press is legitimate.
When the Media(D) has spent 8 years kissing the backside of one President, hiding his scandals and making his poop smell like roses because he has a “D” after his name and then turns on his Republican opponent and the coverage is at least 90% negative, you can’t dismiss the concerns of the average American about media bias.
The fact that no one in the Media(D) — other than a handful of journalists that found themselves on the wrong side of the Obama administration — has bothered to condemn the Obama FBI and DOJ for spying on the Republican presidential nominee in the run-up to the 2016 election is telling.
He’s acting as though bias in media is new — it isn’t. And it’s not “sport” to call out fake news. The majority of the Media(D) has become a joke with their biased coverage and the deliberate alienation of vast swaths of the country. When you have David Brooks of the New York Times making up a red state Trump-voter to interview so that he can put strawman arguments in his imaginary mouth, you know you’ve lost the ability to converse with anyone outside your liberal bubble.
But Chuck says he’s right on top of checking for accuracy in the Media.
Look, I’m checking ourselves all the time. I’m like, “All right. I don’t assume I’m 100 percent right ever.” I don’t get why so many people are comfortable uttering stuff that they may know will look ridiculous in three or four years. It might get them through three or four months. And maybe this is just about getting through a primary, or whatever it is.
Source: Rolling Stone
The Media(D) continues to cover President Trump negatively. It’s so bad that the New York Times had to have an emergency meeting to apologize for a nice headline after a mass shooting. No matter what he does, according to the Media(D) President Trump cannot do a single thing right, but Barack Obama couldn’t do a single thing wrong.
Maybe Chuck should rename his show from Meet the Press to Meet the New Pravda.
