Meet the Press host Chuck Todd in a recent interview dismissed the idea the national corporate press have a “liberal bias,” claiming the entire notion is just a Republican talking point.
“I think objectivity and fairness are not the same thing, in some ways,” Todd said in a discussion with Verge Editor-in-Chief Nilay Patel. “You can’t define objectivity as sort of being equal, that we know. You can’t balance the truth, that we know. 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?”
You see, the Meet the Press host continued, it is Republicans who created this myth of “liberal bias.” It’s not that the media are almost monolithic in their left-wing views or that the media themselves act in an objectively biased partisan manner.
“The Republicans have been running on, ‘There’s a liberal bias in the media,’” Todd said. “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.”
Patel interjected, “I think I’m one of those liberals.”
“Right,” Todd responded. “The point is, if you say it enough, a lot of people believe it.”
“The Republicans have subsumed all of this, and it’s turned into this,” the NBC News host continued. “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 6 times more than they fact-check Democrats.’ Yeah. Perhaps the Republicans are being factually incorrect more often than the Democrats.”
Or perhaps it’s something else. Perhaps the media really are that slanted, to the point that they have little concern for factual accuracy.
Todd continued, claiming the press “overcorrected” the supposed GOP talking point to prove they do not, in fact, have a liberal bias.
“We ended up in this both-sides trope,” he said. “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.”
An “overcorrection” to appear balanced? When, exactly, did this take place? Was it when disgraced newsman Dan Rather went on air with forged documents, alleging falsely during an election year that then-President George W. Bush had gone AWOL for most of his stint in the Texas Air National Guard?
Or was it when reporters heckled then-GOP presidential nominee Mitt Romney about his “gaffes!” during an overseas visit to a memorial to Poland’s fallen war heroes?
Or was it more recently, when the press went all-in on a hoax Russian collusion conspiracy theory, creating a multiyear news cycle of an alternate reality, all based on a document that is probably the handiwork of the Kremlin?
Or how about the media’s universal elevation of the obviously untrustworthy con man Michael Avenatti as a supposed hero of the Trump era? Was that part of the “overcorrection”?
Were the press still trying to prove they have no “liberal bias” when they slandered a Covington Catholic high school student, all based on a brief, context-less video? Were they trying to disprove their “biased” reputation when they gave us the insanely dishonest and sloppy reporting on the dubious, paper-thin allegations of sexual misconduct leveled against Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh during his Senate confirmation hearings?
Was it the pursuit of “balance” that pushed CBS News into airing an extraordinarily slipshod hit job on Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, alleging falsely he rewarded a local grocery chain’s political contributions with an exclusive deal to distribute coronavirus vaccines?
Did “balance” make Katie Couric dishonestly edit an interview with Second Amendment activists in order to make them appear ignorant and dimwitted? Was it “balance” that led ABC News to claim falsely that footage from a gun range in Kentucky actually showed a Trump White House-enabled war crime in Syria?
What was balanced about the media’s efforts last year to suppress a major story about Hunter Biden’s corrupt and depraved behavior? This was a cover-up involving entire news organizations alleging, without evidence and in contradiction of the entire U.S. intelligence community, that the story was part of a “Russian disinformation” campaign.
So, yeah. If our media aren’t horribly biased, then I’d hate to see what truly biased liberal media look like.
