'Chuck Todd's Meet the Press: still trying too hard to make you care about DC'

[AdamSmith]

Nice little filleting of Chuck Todd in particular and Sunday political-yap TV in general.

Chuck Todd's Meet the Press: still trying too hard to make you care about DC

Will any real American ever give a damn about the American Sunday shows ever again? Did you ever?

• Matt Sullivan
• theguardian.com, Sunday 7 September 2014 14.04 EDT

‘I hate to be the thick one on the panel,’ said Joe Scarborough, ‘but that’s my job.’ Video still via NBCNews.com

The best part of Chuck Todd’s allegedly pontification-proof Meet the Press debut on Sunday morning wasn’t when the new moderator let out an “ooh” as he sensed a Twitter-happy scooplet emerging from his interview with Barack Obama. Or when he introduced a new segment called “Who Needs Washington?”, with the declared intention of promoting “people over politics”. It wasn’t even when Todd told the president that “this wouldn’t be Meet the Press if I didn’t have a chart with me”.

No, the most revealing moment of the beginning of the end of America’s longest-running television show arrived when Todd interrupted Joe Scarborough, America’s proudest pundit, as he went off-script – saying that “the American people” don’t care about Obama’s tan suit or his latest gaffe about Isis – and on to a tangent about Bill Clinton.

“That’s where you’re going?” Todd asked, before turning to John Stanton, the Washington bureau chief of Buzzfeed, America’s coolest political site.

“You know, Stanton,” the host began to address his newest contributor and fellow goateed Washington nerd, who had pre-rolled his shirt sleeves to reveal arm-length tattoos and blazer-less internet street cred.

Then Stanton said something shocking, or least shockingly honest for a show normally so self-indulgent as to be rendered unwatchable beyond the Beltway: “The reality is that this election sort of doesn’t matter.”

Todd looked petrified: the Washington echo chamber loves a good gaffe, but even the Washington cool kids know that America doesn’t really listen to Washington smalltalk any more.

Ever the faux-folksy jokester – as during his frequent awkward moments on MSNBC’s The Daily Rundown or network stand-ups from the White House lawn – the new host tried to recover: “I’m trying to have a bunch of shows here before the election, so let’s not say fully that it doesn’t matter.”

It was, in some ways, refreshing: here was the ultimate politics junkie, preventing another pundit from hearing the sound of his own voice – and admitting that he needed viewers. But in trying to resurrect the ultimate politics show, Todd was conducting more than moderating, crafting an outside-the-Beltway image for an inside-the-Beltway institution. He was constructing the impossible, and he is building the perfect show for nobody to watch.

In the run-up to his hastily prepared inauguration, Todd promised “reporter-driven commentary”, to get beyond “crap” talking points and out toward “life on the 5s – I-5 and I-95”, where, presumably an audience that hates Washington will boost sagging ratings for his show ... so long as it’s not all about how great Washington is. Of Scarborough joining the desk, he declared: “If I thought Joe was just pontificating, I wouldn’t have him on.”

He’s no David Gregory – and that’s probably a good thing. Photograph: William B Plowman/AP

David Gregory’s Meet the Press this was not. Gone was the Maryland suburb-style dinner-party table. There was a black woman on set the entire hour. John McCain wasn’t just uninvited, for once: he was derided, probably on purpose.

There was Todd’s “magic” touchscreen wall displaying some midterm poll numbers, but not much discussion about what they meant to real people. He asked Obama a question about human beings – “What do you tell the person that’s going to get deported before the election that this decision was essentially made in your hopes of saving a Democratic Senate?” – and then told the president, face-to-face and eyes fully rolled, that “you hate the theatre”.

Between clips of the Obama interview, Todd still allowed his panel to opine with grand presumption about the president’s dithering abroad, about Hillary Clinton’s candidacy, all with the too-familiar veneer that is the op-ed-ification of “thought leadership” (Scarborough: “I remember reading a column once by Maureen Dowd …”). There was an ad for the Koch brothers’ company ahead of a four-minute conversation about whether the president should be allowed to play golf (Scarborough: “I’ve always said presidents should be able to golf”).

Todd’s between-the-fives goal is noble, but sitting in a semi-circle with the new cool kids of DC doesn’t make them any less terrible or oblivious. Booking Dylan Byers instead of David Brooks is like drinking rat poison instead of turpentine. A Sunday political talkshow, even one under construction, is still built on tunnel vision.

NBC has preached “evolution” for the show, and Todd described his grand experiment on Sunday as “living in a house as we remodel”. More entrepreneur than moderator, his ambitions are to make Meet the Press more relevant, all week long, online. Which shouldn’t be too difficult, given that it has been irrelevant, for one hour a week, and used to be hosted by a guy who barely knew what Twitter was.

At the end of his first Sunday show, as the credits and that long-running John Williams score rolled, Todd gave a fist-bump to his Buzzfeed pal and let out a sigh. Perhaps it was because he’d been running out of time and had to cut his pundit short. Scarborough, with the last word, had been been going somewhere:

“I hate to be the thick one on the panel, but that’s my job. I’m not so sure he’s going to run. It’s just like with Jeb. I’m still trying to figure out if Jeb’s going to run. We get the news this past week that Jeb’s …”

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/sep/07/chuck-todd-meet-the-press-american-sunday-shows

[Guest EXPAT]

I really liked Meet The Press when Tim Russert was the host. He is the last reporter in any genre that actually did his homework and really held the politicians accountable. I think most were afraid of him which is how it should be. I hope Chuck Todd can do that but I doubt it because they are all so afraid of being blackballed by someone they might offend.