NBC’s Chuck Todd dismisses liberal media bias claims
July 30, 2021
In an interview with The Verge on Tuesday, NBC News political reporter Chuck Todd dismissed the notion that the media is biased towards the left.
“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? The Republicans have been running on, ‘There’s a liberal bias in the media.’ 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,” he said.
“We shouldn’t [have] accepted the premise that there was liberal bias,” he continued.
Todd then speculated that when it comes to claims Republicans are fact-checked far more than Democrats perhaps it’s because they are wrong more in trying to justify the discrepancy.
“I hear the attacks on fact-checkers where they ‘fact-check Republicans six times more than they fact-check Democrats.’ Yeah. Perhaps the Republicans are being factually incorrect more often than the Democrats.”
When it comes to fairness and balance Todd thought that the media “overcorrected” at the beginning of the century and blamed Fox News for convincing the public there was a need for balance.
“We ended up in this both-sides trope. 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.”
What Todd ignored was decades of liberal media bias from the Vietnam War, where they sympathized with left-wing anti-war protesters and covered up the atrocities of the North Vietnamese communists, to the uncontrolled hatred for Donald Trump–and the scores of inaccurate stories about him and his administration–to the lack of coverage for Hunter Biden’s sketchy art deal and non-reporting of President Biden’s failures in his first six months in office.
Everyone would like the truth, the problem is that Chuck Todd and his colleagues have been the arbiters of what that means for far too long.