I’m generous enough to congratulate Chuck Todd on landing the Meet the Press gig even though I see it as an uninspired choice. Without a doubt, Todd has earned the promotion in the sense that he paid his dues and made sure to gain the knowledge that he’ll need to do the show. He was the logical choice.
I just don’t hold out a lot of hope that he’ll do anything particularly worthy with the opportunity. The show will be smarter than it has been under David Gregory’s stewardship, but it probably won’t break out of the cocoon that seems to plague the Sunday morning shows. My best advice to Todd is not to develop an insular group of recurring guests made up from people who attend Sally Quinn’s cocktail parties. Branch out. Try to find guests who don’t live in Washington DC or New York, and that have never appeared on the Sunday morning shows before. Find interesting people who have unexpected things to say. Tap into the scientific and academic worlds, and try to get guests from other countries to offer their perspectives. Defining the red/blue divide on any given issue should be the starting point, not the whole point.
And, when trying to find the progressive point of view, reach out to community organizers, faith leaders, union leaders, and urban politicians in order to delve into how the left differs from the party leaders in Washington.
Also, John McCain has already filled his quota for Meet the Press appearances. Unless he has something original to say, he shouldn’t be a guest.
Oh. Ya mean kinda like what Chris Hayes does routinely?
Wouldn’t Sunday morning reruns of Stewart-Colbert-Oliver garner a larger (and younger and less white) audience than the Sunday talk shows?
Well, Boo, I’ll give you an “A” for effort. This is great advice, even though we all know that Todd will never, ever take it. Only liberals seem to care about the opinions of people in “the scientific and academic worlds” or have any interest at all what any guest from a foreign country has to say. As for community organizers, faith leaders (except fundamentalist Christians), union leaders and urban politicians, their input is simply of no interest to beltway pundits. And also, we can forget about hearing the views of secularists or any non-theists.
I’m not sure that anything Todd does can take MTP any deeper into the crapper at this point. It will improve simply because it can’t get much worse. In today’s media environment, the Sunday shows are dinosaurs that are ambling down the road toward extinction and irrelevance. Todd certainly isn’t going to be their savior from the inevitable throes of death.
But if Todd has Larry Summers on MTP, Todd could make Summers squirm by asking for his reponse to
Maryam Mirzakhani winning a Fields Medal. A woman, and an Iranian as well, that can not only do math but do it better than 99.999% of professional mathematicians.
Worth reading is James Bamford’s profile of ES in Wired, The Most Wanted Man in the World. Answers a few questions. Not surprised by his father disclosed that Snowden tested twice with an IQ above 145. His video interview with Greenwald was sufficient for anyone that’s trained in IQ testing to recognize that he is wicked smart, in that zone of 0.1% of the population.
Yes, but his belief in a technological utopia is concerning.
Maybe the techno-geeks will outgrow their libertarian cyber-utopia. IMHO they way overestimate the value of the digital age for humans in general. Instead of simplifying our lives, they’ve made the ever more complex. Instead of a million meter readers earning a living wage, we get a handful of billionaires and multi-millionaires, a few thousand techno-geeks, a few thousand real people to push the right buttons when consumers finally reach a live person, and bills that are incomprehensible. Then we all lie to ourselves and each other that modernization is wonderful.
I generally despise Chuck Todd but I will admit that he’s drastically superior to Gregory, Russert or – God forbid – Scarborough and Mika – but I will nevertheless continue to almost never watch MTP.
Up with Steve Kornacki is so much better than any other weekend show as to render the rest of them completely irrelevant and worthless. Chris Hayes is just as good as Kornacki in content, but his style irritates some people (not me). Kornacki is smoother and more professional than anyone else out there.
The reason Kornacki would have been the best and ballsiest choice is that he’s managed to develop a style that can’t accurately be called partisan. He’s a lefty but he never breaks character in terms of expressing everything in an objective way – he always takes pains to be completely objective (unlike, for example, Maddow – Hayes was objective until he came under ratings pressure on weeknights and had to try to be more attention-grabbing). Hayes, Maddow, Sharpton, O’Donnell, Reid, Wagner … all good and eminently watchable, but all of them are purely partisan – fine for their own shows, but not acceptable for MTP. Schultz and Matthews are partisan but not so good. Matthews is unbelievably annoying with his constant interruption and Schultz is just hackneyed and intellectually lazy. His only feature is that his voice sounds like so much like Limbaugh’s and it’s amusing to hear that type of voice advocating from the left.
Back to MTP, Kornacki would be 1000 times better than Todd and still be able to avoid coming across as a lefty partisan. But … whatever … as long as Up doesn’t get canceled I’m fine with continuing to never watch MTP. I find Up to be even better than the best of bloggingheads.tv, which we haven’t mentioned, and which has the potential to be the best of all of them if it could be more timely – its main flaw is that it has too little content, too late – but it tackles many interesting topics in depth that are never mentioned elsewhere – especially on foreign policy.
“Also, John McCain has already filled his quota for Meet the Press appearances.”
Please add Lindsay Graham to this list.
I find Chuck Todd to be the most boring newsman I have ever had the misfortune to listen to.
Chuck Todd is indistinguishable from David Gregory. This change will not improve the ratings for MTP. There’s no better example of “rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic.”