-By Warner Todd Huston
All week we’ve been exploring America’s ten most left-biased working journalists and now we come to spot number four on the list. And so, for his close attention to pushing the spin and as one of the most active members of the Old Media’s Obama Butt Covering squad, we are pleased to award the number four spot to NBC Political Director Chuck Todd.
Todd is one of those journos that came from Democrat political circles — having worked for Iowa Democrat Senator Tom Harkin’s 1992 presidential run — and then crossed over into the world of “journalism.” With that you just know that he can be as unbiased as the best of them in his reporting. Well, if he can we’ll never know it because so far he has not been. Just the opposite, really.
Todd has done a bang-up job for the left in his journalism career. Likely Todd’s loyalty to the Democrat Party is probably why he felt the need to slam Senator Joe Lieberman last year, for instance. Proving his blindness to real political analysis, Todd claimed that Joe Lieberman was the “polar opposite” of the Senate’s lone socialist Senator Bernie Sanders (officially an “independent”).
In a discussion on the Today Show about the then yet to pass Obamacare bill, Todd said of Lieberman and Sanders, “Meanwhile, the Senate’s two Democratic independents, polar opposites ideologically, are split over the bill’s government-run public option and both are threatening to scuttle the process if they don’t get their way.”
This claim that the two are “polar opposites” is just plain absurd. Lieberman is not very far to the right of socialist Sanders at all except in one respect; support for the war. Other than for his outspoken support of the war on terror and the efforts in Iraq and Afghanistan, Senator Joe Lieberman is a dyed-in-the-wool, liberal Democrat all the way down the line. He does not much differ from the left-wing ideas that Sanders spouts and never has.
Chuck Todd, however, felt the need to make some sort of conservative out of Lieberman perhaps because the Senator jettisoned the Democrat Party and ran as an independent for his Connecticut Senate seat. Obviously Todd was dutifully punishing Lieberman in fealty to the Party line.
Over the last year, Todd has repeatedly gone out of his way to help Obama soften his failures and push the Democrat’s talking points all while pretending at being a journalist.
In one case last month, Todd appeared on MSNBC’s “Daily Rundown” and waxed hopeful that Obama would use the BP oil spill to push new energy regulations on an already over regulated nation. Echoing White House Chief of Staff Rham Emanuel’s desire not to let a “good crisis go to waste,” Todd hoped that Obama could use the disaster to his own ends.
“So if energy legislation isn’t taken up and dealt with, this would basically be — I hate to put it this way — a wasted disaster,” Todd said in agreement with guest Tom Daschle’s points. Daschle himself is a politician famed for being fired in 2003 from his Democrat Senate leadership position when voters turned him out of office. (See the exchange at about one third of the way through the MSNBC video)
Chuck Todd is also all about helping The One distance himself from controversy. In a July interview with the president Todd brought up Obama’s controversial recess appointment of Donald Berwick to head Medicare but seemed quite keen to help Obama obviate why the appointment was controversial in the first place.
When he asked Obama about the Berwick appointment, Todd never once explained that Berwick was a proponent of rationing healthcare, preventing the poor and sick from getting it, which is why the appointment is outrageous. Instead, Todd helped guide Obama to blame “the broken system” on the appointment’s controversial component.
Do you think Washington is broken? And the reason I ask you this, because when you appointed – you did the recess appointment of Donald Berwick. You seemed to send the message of one of two things. Either you didn’t want to debate about health care again on Capitol Hill, which got a little raucous a year ago or you know what? “The Senate process is broken and we gotta go around it?”
(See video from The Today Show at about the 9:30 mark)
This appointment had nothing at all to do with Washington being “broken” and everything to do with Obama’s inability to fool enough Senators into agreeing with his appointment of a healthcare radical to head Medicare. Chuck Todd to the rescue, though.
And the Internet? Our friendly NBC correspondent is no fan, especially of the Drudge Report. In an interview conducted by Mediaite’s Tommy Christopher, Chuck Todd revealed his conceit that he and his Old Media cohorts are the only proper guardians of what is “news” when he slammed Drudge.
“You know it when you see it,” Todd told Christopher, “where you see it’s an opinion article allegation, not even a factually based story, that suddenly draws a question simply because the Drudge Report linked to it…. There’s no worse crime in journalism these days than simply deciding something’s a story because Drudge links to it… I just don’t happen to think that that’s the proper way for us to decide what’s news.”
We don’t want anyone on the Internet trying to “decide” what’s news, right folks? Let’s leave that to the pros. The rest of us just aren’t qualified.
But wait, Todd isn’t just saying the Internet is illegitimate for determining news. He has also signed on wholeheartedly with the lefty meme that Fox News is similarly illegitimate. Just last February Todd claimed that Fox was “out to undermine 90%” of the journalists out there.
“…there is certain news organizations out here whose agenda is to undermine the 90% of journalists who are just simply trying to cover stories out there. And that’s what really frustrates me about what’s happened in the media landscape. It is a business for some media organizations to undermine the quote-unquote mainstream media because it’s good for their business.”
Interestingly, about “90%” of the rest of the Old Media is filled with leftists as extreme as Todd, as recent evidence suggests.
But it isn’t just the Democrat Party and the Old Media Chuck Todd is out to safeguard. Why, he also wants to protect the Republicans. Mr. Todd wants to make sure none of that unwashed rabble in the tea party movement is allowed to influence the GOP.
In an April ‘09 Today Show segment with host Matt Lauer, Todd was keen to guide his viewers into dismissing as inconsequential the tea party events then being held by the hundreds all across the country.
“There’s been some grassroots conservatives who have organized so-called ‘tea parties’ around the company–country hoping the historical reference will help galvanize Americans against the president’s economic ideas,” Todd told Lauer. “But I tell you, the idea hasn’t really caught on,” he assured everyone.
Trenchant commentary that.
So what do we have with a Chuck Todd? A former Democratic operative turned journalist that hates Fox News, denigrates the Internet, covers for Obama, pushes the left’s narrative, and hates the tea party movement.
Yeah… that’s pretty unbiased. And this is why Chuck Todd figures into our top ten most left-biased American journalists.
With only three more spots to fill, please check back tomorrow for left-biased journalist number three as our series begins to wind down.
The Full Top Ten List:
- 1). Helen Thomas, UPI/Independent
- 2). Joe Klein, Time Magazine
- 3). Paul Krugman, The New York Times
- 4). Chuck Todd, NBC
- 5). Cynthia Tucker, Atlanta Journal-Constitution
- 6). Rick Sanchez, CNN
- 7). Howard Fineman, Newsweek
- 8). Christiane Amanpour CNN
- 9). Liz Sidoti, Associated Press
- 10). Neil Steinberg, Chicago Sun-Times
____________
“The only end of writing is to enable the reader better to enjoy life, or better to endure it.”
–Samuel Johnson
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Warner Todd Huston is a Chicago based freelance writer. He has been writing opinion editorials and social criticism since early 2001 and before that he wrote articles on U.S. history for several small American magazines. His political columns are featured on many websites such as Andrew Breitbart’s BigGovernment.com, BigHollywood.com, and BigJournalism.com, as well as RightWingNews.com, CanadaFreePress.com, StoptheACLU.com, Wizbang.com, among many, many others. Huston has also appeared on Fox News, Fox Business Network, CNN, and many local TV shows as well as numerous talk radio shows throughout the country.
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