NBC political director Chuck Todd complained this week on MTP Daily that two generations of legacy media journalists are having trouble covering President Donald Trump because they have been trained to cover politics “dispassionately.”
“We’re the umpires,” Todd said, emphasizing that he and his colleagues are “referees” who “are not to show emotion.”
Exasperated, Todd asked, “when somebody is insisting on making you the story, what do you do?”
“This has been a struggle for all of us,” he said. “I struggle with it.”
Todd also said that legacy media journalists have not been trained to cover “moral failings,” and that is why they are “not good with having to say what’s right or wrong.”
Those in the legacy media can claim they are “umpires” all they want but their strike zones have always been as wide as the late Eric Gregg’s for Democrats and as narrow as Tim Tschida’s for Republicans, especially those who favor nationalist policies. And since new and social media can now expose their biases like K-zone has done in baseball, the media are becoming apoplectic.
Those like Todd have dispassionately chosen for decades which critical pieces of information to ignore to advance their preferred narratives and, like professional wresting commentators, what leading questions to ask their favored candidates on the left. And if legacy media reporters are referees as Todd claims, they are more like rasslin’ referees who, under the guise of neutrality, are critical players in working with the wrestlers to determine how matches and story lines end.
Case in point—the morning after news broke that Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) and his wife were under FBI investigation for possible bank fraud and hired lawyers, Todd, who worked for Iowa Democrat Tom Harkin’s presidential campaign and whose wife has been a top operative for various Democrats, did not ask Sanders a single question about the scandal.
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