Chuck todd n b c

see sunday talk (not a great record on agw for a long time?)

mtp reports? peacock

9 24

msnbc press show chuck todd? prager u ryan walters says schools unions tcher marxist 5x no challenge?

prager says back to basics many times, schools 1930’s socio pts out segregated

https://www.alternet.org/chuck-todd-announces-resignation/

see nbc head-butt w/ djt

hunter

https://www.alternet.org/amy-klobaucher/

https://www.alternet.org/biden-didnt-defy-a-subpoena/

chuck todd fact check

mta docu image attack on him climate?

an 1 23

On Sunday's edition of NBC's Meet the Press, United States Senator Joe Manchin (D-West Virginia) rehashed his defense of the Senate filibuster after moderator Chuck Todd asked him about his "viral" high-five with Senator Kyrsten Sinema (I-Arizona) at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland on Tuesday, January 17th.

"You just came from Davos. There's a moment – I don't know if you realize how that went viral between you and Senator Sinema – I want to show the moment here. I want to ask you about it. You guys are high-fiving. I think we'll show it again here. And I think it was right after she was talking about the filibuster. Yeah. Is that what you were high-fiving and about?" Todd asked.

"Yeah, that was, I think. And after that and I didn't, I saw her hand go up, and I said, sure. Because here the two of us are committed to protecting the filibuster, which I think protects checks and balances on the Executive Branch," Manchin replied.

"So if you have a Democrat, Democrat, Democrat – president, House, and Senate – and you have a strong president, basically the leader of the party, then you don't have a check and balance, because I guarantee the House and Senate will roll to wherever the president wants," he continued.

"And I've said this before," Manchin recalled, "I appreciate the Republican senators and under leadership of McCall of Senate, minority leader at that time, McConnell, majority leader at that time, with Donald Trump every day beating on him, get rid of the filibuster.'"

Watch below or at this link.

what was chuck reaction? unmanly?

an 11 21

After the acquittal of Kyle Rittenhouse on Friday afternoon, right-wing trolls — many of whom are elected members of Congress — were ecstatic at this prime opportunity to trigger the liberals.Reps. Matt Gaetz of Florida, Madison Cawthorne of North Carolina, and Paul Gosar of Arizona — all Republicans more interested in trolling than governance — made showily public offers of an internship to Rittenhouse. Cawthorne even took it to the next level, instructing his supporters to "be armed and dangerous."

Never one to be out-trolled, Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia let loose with some truly unhinged tweets about "radical Marxists" who are trying to start "a race war," proclaiming that "gun rights are the only thing holding back the Communist Revolution the Democrats are waging." And on the Senate side, Ted Cruz of Texas attacked the "corrupt corporate media," skillfully targeting the very people he needs to amplify his message and get that sweet trolling attention.

Right-wing pundits joined in on all the gleeful trolling, as well.

Ann Coulter tweeted a meme equating Rittenhouse with superheroes, and Donald Trump Jr., forever trying and failing at being a Twitter wit, wrote, "The Rittenhouse jury just gave Biden his second colonoscopy of the day." Multiple right-wingers on social media wrote songs to honor Rittenhouse. On Friday, popular and t**rollish YouTuber Steven Crowder**celebrated the verdict by insisting, "it's so wrong that we teach young men that violence is immoral," and encouraged viewers to follow in Rittenhouse's lead by taking up arms against Black Lives Matter protesters. Tucker Carlson, King of the Trolls, will host Rittenhouse on his Fox News show and insisted that he's "not a racist person." This claim is impossible, of course, to square with the photos taken earlier this year in a Wisconsin bar where Rittenhouse partied with Proud Boys and flashed white supremacist signs at the camera.

All of these provocations worked as intended: They got attention and garnered liberal outrage. "Liberal tears" are the most valuable commodity in Republican circles these days, and nothing brings forth tears like senseless violence. For those who subsist on liberal outrage, the dunks were easy and plentiful, because it turns out those silly liberals really do make frowny faces over the celebration of political violence.

The right is reacting to this verdict like they're sports fans whose team just vanquished a rival team in the Superbowl. The excitement on the right was palpable, but also measurable. As an analysis from Raw Story shows, Facebook exploded with conservative celebrations of the verdict, with "18 of the top 20 most engaged page links in the world" originating with conservative American pages. And the pleasure of the moment was explicitly tied to joy over how upset liberals — or at least those perceived as liberals — were. Right-wing figurehead Dan Bongino, who is reliably one of the most popular figures on Facebook, posted a link claiming Chuck Todd "nearly cries" after the verdict. The post garnered over 3,000 shares and 68,000 reactions, the majority of which were the "laughing" emoji.

It's not just that this behavior is tasteless. It also illustrates how violence is the logical endpoint of the right-wing obsession with trolling liberals. If your goal is provoking a reaction, then violence is surely the most efficient way to do it. Unlike mean tweets and "f*ck your feelings" T-shirts, violence simply cannot be ignored. By celebrating this violence, congressional Republicans and right-wing media are openly inviting more of it, because the reward of upsetting people on the left is just so delicious. The distinction between right-wing trolling and violence is collapsing.

To be certain, the escalation of violence-as-trolling has been going on for a while now. As Eric Boehler wrote in his Press Run newsletter, "The flashpoints of Republicans and conservatives promoting political violence have become ceaseless, to the point of frightening normalization," to the point where polling data suggests "that as many as 21 million Americans think that the use of force is justifiedto restore Donald Trump to the presidency."

Much of the month has been dominated by a story about Gosar tweeting out a fan-made video that depicts him murdering President Joe Biden and Democratic Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York. The Democratic-controlled House responded to this unsubtle threat by censuring Gosar and stripping him of his committee assignments, but nearly all Republicans stood by Gosar. The excuse used to defend Gosar's behavior was that he was just trolling liberals for fun. Gosar's digital director even put out a statement saying, "Everyone needs to relax. The left doesn't get meme culture. They have no joy."

However, right-wing "joy" is not mutually exclusive from violence.

Gosar's tweet wasboth trolling to get a reaction from the left and a threat of violence. Trolling is a crucial aspect to both amplifying violent threats and helping conservatives hype each other up for more violence. That's why Gosar doubled down by retweeting the video minutes after being censured for it. The message is clear: If you love outraging the left, then violence is the swiftest way to do it.

Even Rittenhouse's behavior prior to killing two people at a Kenosha, Wisconsin protest last year embodies this troll logic. As Farhad Manjoo of the New York Times observed, Rittenhouse's presence at the protest was clearly a provocation. Rittenhouse carried a showy AR-15 "in part because the rifle "looked cool," and the gun "seemed to invite conflict." Popular right-wing troll Drew Hernandez was at the protest that night, anthat, when some protesters saw Rittenhouse and other men with guns, "they immediately attempted to agitate them, to try and start some conflict with them."

In other words, Rittenhouse's AR-15 functioned both as a troll and as a deadly weapon. The distinction between trying to "trigger the liberals" and actually pulling the trigger on liberals collapsed completely the night Rittenhouse shot three people, killing two. He certainly got what every right-wing troll wants, which is an outraged and dramatic reaction from people he perceived as liberals. The result was two dead bodies — and another opportunity for GOP leaders to troll some more, further reinforcing the idea that, for those who live for triggering the liberals, nothing works better to get a reaction than actual violence.

no lnx twt

Sunday shows are a relic of a lazy low-stakes era

Hunter and Daily Kos October 24, 2021

On one of the now unwatchable Sunday "news" shows, Meet the Press host Chuck Todd introduced a segment on the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic by—I'm just kidding. It wasn't about the COVID-19 pandemic. It was a segment about the most favorite of all Sunday show segments, and indeed largely the only segment any of the Sunday shows ever do: How will This Thing, the major news of the day, Affect Mah Politics?

"The economy's inability to fully recover from the shock of COVID-19 is both an economic story and a political one," intoned Todd.

The economy's inability to fully recover from the COVID-19 pandemic is in large part due to anti-distancing, anti-mask, vaccine-skeptical, pro-virus-spreading policies from Republican politicians who have been using conservative frustration with safety measures as a rallying cry for their own careers, resulting in a new wave of overwhelmed hospitals and dead victims that was entirely preventable if sociopathic politicos had not turned pandemic crisis protocols into the latest spite-riddled "culture war."

"All those economic problems add up to a big political problem for the president. Is all of this his fault? Of course not, but it is now his responsibility. And he and fellow Democrats are in real danger of suffering some serious political consequences. Mr. Biden ran on a promise of a basic return to normal—or at least a path to normalcy. But with the midterm elections just over a year away—"

Stop. Just stop. Fine, we get it. We're doing this again. Republicans continue to get their constituents killed at elevated rates; let's now turn to our panel of experts to determine what the political implications of Republicans killing off their constituents will be for the Democrats who, uh, failed to convince them not to die to own the libs.

"Whadda think, Bob? Think all those surviving family members are gonna punish Democrats in the midterms?"

"I dunno, Steve, but between that and Americans quitting their dangerous bullshit pandemic poverty-wage jobs to look for better ones, there's real chaos out there on the streets. And it doesn't look good for anyone waiting for a Tickle-me-Elmo toy because the container ships are real backed up over on the left coast. And what if Republicans decide to start shooting constituents in the face? That'd look real bad for Joe Biden, who's run on a platform of not shooting people in the face."

And it ain't just that. Another of the Todd segments scraped up another entry in the "obsessively arch-right fascist Trump supporters still like Trump" press compulsion. Hey, the guy may have attempted to end our democracy through hoaxes and violence, but a bunch of Jesus-punchers think, if anything, that just makes him even more awesome.

We've been here before. This ain't new, andMatt Negrin, in particular, has brought all the necessary receipts and then some to show that Chuck Todd's Meet the Press, in particular, is a relentless promoter of Republican frames, one that uses the "panel" format to mix hard-right Republican strategists and figures in with neutral journalists while studiously avoiding Democratic guests. Most insipidly, Todd has been a prime rehabilitator for the Republican supporters of an election hoax that led to a violent insurrection.

[https://twitter.com/MattNegrin/status/1449747691639119873

Why? Is that "neutrality"? Is it "news"?

The problem with Meet the Press is the problem with all political journalism: It shouldn't exist. It's lazy. It's cheap, hackish, phone-it-in programming cobbled together because doing journalism is hard but talking about the "political implications" of any news story is easy. Ask how the ongoing mostly Republican-state COVID-19 crisis is affecting social programs and you'll have to do research to find out. Ask whether the stance of anti-mask politicians like Ron DeSantis is morally defensible and you'll have to expose your own moral convictions.

Ask how the widespread death and economic chaos will affect the political winds when whatever-the-next-election-is rolls around, though, and you don't need to know a damn thing. It's easy. It's trivial. Pick out whichever guests will most reliably say something "exciting" and you've got yourself a show.

"Hey, Trump campaign spokesguy Jason Miller, the price of chicken went up by ten cents over the last six months. How do you think that's gonna play among [spins wheel] Evangelical voters in [throws dart] Wyoming?"

"I think this is great news for Donald Trump, and I'd also like to mention here that Wyoming Evangelicals are also very worried about Joe Biden's surrender to the mole people that happened last Thursday but that nobody here is reporting. Also, Joe Biden eats children."

"Thanks, Jason, we'll have to leave it there."

Anyone can opine about politics. It requires no expertise. It requires little thought. On television, where nobody in front of or behind the cameras gives a particular damn whether or not a guest just lies outright to the nation because they'll already be three lies beyond that one before anyone else can get a word in edgewise, there is absolutely no penalty for being wrong. Or lying. Or undermining democracy. Or egging on violence. Or anything else.

The Sunday shows are the worst thing politics can be: no-stakes. It is all just a game, a little game among the wealthy professional class to fill time while questions of morality and decency are pooh-poohed as the naive domain of the common rabble. True political journalism covers democracy and fascism as neutral ideological combatants; considers death ancillary to poll numbers; judges economic policy based on the analysis of whoever has the most money to spend on analysis; considers false propaganda to be Reasonable, if it can be made Effective; and, above all, dodges all policy considerations in favor of meta-debate about which political figures will most have their images buffed or tarnished from the policy's defeat or acceptance.

Would it be economically wise to avoid a worldwide climate catastrophe that sinks Florida, burns much of the West to a cinder, causes widespread crop failures, and renders certain parts of the globe literally uninhabitable if the air conditioners fail? There's not even a question! Set aside every moral and environmental question, and you're still left with the unambiguous case that moving national energy policy toward less-polluting alternatives will save the country from unfathomable economic costs in the decades to come.

We're not going to get that conversation on Meet the Press, ever, because no non-journalist booked on Meet the Press knows a damn thing about it. We're not going to get the kind of hard-edged reporting that the profession idolizes in fictional stories but shudders with contempt at providing itself, reporting in which political figures are confronted about their astonishing ineptitude in managing this or any other of the existential issues of the day.

We will get an unending parade of professional know-nothings to discuss how Joe Manchin's posturing or Bernie Sanders' gruffness might bump off-year poll numbers in the span between now and the future crisis, because that's the sort of talk that allows charlatans who don't believe in anything to have opinions on everything.

I'm tired. We're all tired. These shows are astonishingly tired, shambling along like brainless zombies wandering past thickets of political violence, environmental cataclysm, mass disease, widespread government failure, and the alteration of the nation's democratic discourse into, literally, an arena of professional hoax-promotion. The old formats were designed for sleepier times when the nation could coast along, ineffective and only a little bit corrupt, with no wars that affected the Important People or economic tragedies that the Important People could not weather. Now that we have passed through decades of ambivalent puttering to come face-to-face with genuine crisis, we learn that none of the shows are built to grapple with crises. They were a child's toy, a little playground in which the powerful could snip playfully at each other on camera before going to eat in the same tony restaurants and golf at the same posh resorts. They were not meant to tackle true problems—only to provide small, timed skits showing what tackling problems might look like, according to the fictions of the day, while making sure that none of it ever truly solved anything or even moved the conversation forward.

Those are not the formats in which a nation can grapple with a pandemic that will likely kill a million of its citizens. It would be farcical in the case of, say, a predicted asteroid strike or supervolcano eruption. It would be rendered so grotesquely absurd, if God Himself were to saunter down with a message or if alien life punched a hole through dimensions to invite us to dinner, that it would pass only as low comedy. Nobody on these shows gives a damn if the nation falls or the atmosphere burns. It was only meant to be a club for idle banter, nothing bold enough as to even scrape the lines of are laws based on overt bigotries bad or just a cultural choice, the sort of vapid dorm room debates on "are seat belts good" or "does unleaded gas represent government tyranny" that nobody involved would give two shits about, on their way home from the studio.

Meet the Press found itself confronting an actual insurrection—and folded. It couldn't cope. It had no tools for the job. So Chuck Todd invited the insurrectionists onto the program and helped redeem even election hoaxes, party-backed propaganda and candidate-organized insurrection as a reasonable political choice to be made.Not because he or anyone else involved gave a particular damn either way, and not because they did not, but because there is no Sunday morning format that can handle violent insurrection except as fodder for the professional know-nothings to banter aimlessly about. It was never meant to have actual stakes. Nobody, in any of the network executive suites, even knows what such a thing would look like.

https://www.alternet.org/2021/05/stealing-2024-election/

there's only one way to stop Republicans from stealing the 2024 election

Amanda Marcotte Salon

May 17, 2021

Texas Rep. Dan Crenshaw was pretty angry with NBC's Chuck Todd on Sunday's episode of "Meet the Press." Todd was uncharacteristically determined to hold the Republican's feet to the fire, calling him out for his support of Donald Trump's Big Lie.

"Why should anybody believe a word you say if the Republican Party itself doesn't have credibility?" the host asked. When Crenshaw, clearly annoyed at being called out for his B.S., retreated by whining that "the press is largely liberal," Todd was rightly contemptuous, retorting, "There's nothing lazier than that excuse!"

At stake: Crenshaw's support for Trump's false claims that Joe Biden stole the 2020 election, claims that Trump used to justify an attempted coup and to incite an insurrection on January 6. Crenshaw's main role in all of that, as Todd pointed out, was joining a lawsuit filed by Texas' Republican Attorney General Ken Paxton which leveraged false accusations of "fraud" in a failed attempt to get the Supreme Court to throw out the results of the election. During the interview, Crenshaw hid behind a line that is increasingly popular among Republicans who are trying to wave off questions about their support for Trump's attempted coup: "[I]t's time to move on."

Republicans are increasingly circling around this talking point. They insist that the coup is ancient history and that it's churlish to keep rehashing who did and did not join in efforts to overturn democracy. It's the favored justification for the ouster of Wyoming's Rep. Liz Cheney from House GOP leadership, with Republicans claiming it's not that she refuses to support Trump's election lies so much as that she just keeps going on about it. And it was the line that House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy, R-Calif., trotted out last week, while trying to wave off media inquiries about the GOP's increasingly fierce backing of Trump's Big Lie: "I don't think anyone is questioning the legitimacy of the presidential election. I think that is all over with, we're sitting here with the President today."

The problem with this "water under the bridge" approach is twofold. First, it should be self-evident that seditious behavior should not be so easily forgotten or forgiven. Second, Republicans themselves have not moved on from the attempted insurrection or the lies that Trump used to justify it. On the contrary, Republican leaders have spent the past four months actively moving not just to turn Trump's Big Lie into GOP canon but to use it to justify laying the groundwork for Trump or some other GOP nominee to successfully steal the 2024 election.

"[I]f the current Republican Party controls both Houses of Congress on Jan. 6, 2025, there's no way if a Democrat is legitimately elected they will get certified as the president-elect," Erica Newland of Protect Democracy recently told Michelle Goldberg of the New York Times. As Goldberg goes on to detail, since the insurrection, Republicans "have systematically attacked the safeguards that protected the last election" — and not just with voter suppression laws, either.

Republican officials or politicians who stood against Trump's efforts to steal the election are being driven out of office and new laws are being passed to allow GOP-controlled state legislatures to invalidate the results of any election that a Democrat wins. Republicans are also passing harsh "electoral integrity" laws that are actually more about using threats of prosecution to intimidate election officials into looking the other way from GOP efforts to steal elections. And, as Goldberg writes, they are clearly lining up to justify it when a GOP-controlled House simply refuses to certify a Democratic winner of the 2024 election.

As Matt Gertz at Media Matters documented last week, the propaganda apparatus for the GOP — especially Fox News — has "responded to Donald Trump's 2020 defeat by institutionalizing his lie that the election was stolen and laying the groundwork to rig the next presidential election in favor of the GOP." Gertz writes:

Fox's propagandists are getting ready. They are cheering on the GOP's purges of officials insufficiently committed to authoritarian rule in the U.S. They are validating and valorizing the Capitol insurrectionists as patriots simply "there to support the president of the United States and defend our republic" rather than a collection of extremists. They are falsely claiming that Democratic pro-democracy legislation before Congress would "destroy the credibility of all future elections," while defending Republican efforts to restrict voting rights in the states.

In a piece at **The Bulwark last month**, Jonathan Last laid out how the GOP has been busy "removing the Republican officials who were not willing to comply [with the coup] last time" and plotting out "how a Republican can win the presidency even while losing the popular vote and the Electoral College," i.e. how to steal the next election. Mona Charen,part of the small and shrinking group of Republicans who still believe in democracy, warned in another piece at The Bulwark last week that "the 2024 mantra" of the GOP "is going to be 'Steal It Back.'"

I got a taste this weekend when I tweeted out Goldberg's piece. I got a vicious reaction, as one conservative tweeter after another retorted by with variations of the argument that they are entitled to steal the 2024 election as revenge for Biden stealing the 2020 election. Of course, this is a lie — Biden won fair and square — but it was a small indicator of how "steal it back" is, indeed, becoming the Republican mantra.

This has all happening a mere four months into Biden's presidency. Republicans still have three and a half more years to keep building the political will and infrastructure necessary to steal the election in 2024, and clearly have every intention of doing so.

Democrats, meanwhile, seem wholly unable to take measures to slow down the coup train, between letting the filibuster kill any hope of passing bills to prevent these Republican manuevers and Biden's unwillingness to unleash the Justice Department to hold Trump accountable for his many crimes, which would take Trump out of the equation in 2024. The only real obstacle to the GOP successfully stealing the 2024 election is the mainstream media continuing to call out Trump's Big Lie and those Republicans who continue to support it. The public's refusal to be complacent is the main reason Trump failed to steal the 2020 election, and if there's any hope of stopping Republicans from pulling it off in 2024, the public must stay alert and ready to fight for their democracy. That's why Republicans are trying to bully journalists into shutting up about the insurrection already.

FROM YOUR SITE ARTICLES

chuck Todd slammed for 'malfeasance of journalism' for allowing pro-Trump Republican to spew 'blatant lies'

David Badash The New Civil Rights Movement

November 23, 2020

**Chuck Todd** is once again under fire, as calls mount to fire the host of NBC News' once-venerated "Meet the Press."

Todd on Sunday hosted Republican U.S.[ // creshshaw] vs markey]Congressman Kevin Cramer of North Dakota, an early supporter of Donald Trump, and allowed him to lie on-air with nearly no push-back.

Among the lies Rep. Cramer spewed in just 21 seconds: The Obama administration spied on Donald Trump, the Mueller Russia investigation "started with no evidence and ended proving that there was no evidence," and the impeachment of the President was "crazy."

These are blatant lies from Sen. Kevin Cramer and Chuck Todd should've pushed back on them https://t.co/ZAyLipVn2i

— Aaron Rupar (@Aaron Rupar)1606057497.0

Cramer also went on to falsely claim Trump's baseless and frivolous lawsuits – including the most recent one that a judge tossed out "with prejudice" – are "appropriate." Out of three dozen lawsuits Trump has lost 34 and won just two.

And while Cramer did say that the GSA should release the transition funds to President-elect Joe Biden he refused to acknowledge Biden won the election. He also spewed other lies, with no pushback from Todd, including: Joe Biden has not yet won the election, Trump "is just exercising his legal options," and Biden has been "over-dramatic."

Now even more people want Chuck Todd fired.

15 days ago Biden won the election. Today @chucktodd gave Republican Sen. Kevin Cramer 8 minutes on @MeetThePress t… https://t.co/URcQhUgWlY

— Matt Negrin, HOST OF HARDBALL AT 7PM ON MSNBC (@Matt Negrin, HOST OF HARDBALL AT 7PM ON MSNBC)1606056796.0

Chuck Todd has at least 3 obvious flaws as the Meet the Press moderator: He is a biased in favor of the white pat… https://t.co/ItS9eLpR67

— ☇RiotWomenn☇ (@☇RiotWomenn☇)1606061870.0

Chuck Todd is a National Embarrassment He should not be the anchor of a formerly highly respected Sunday Show let a… https://t.co/02VihASW9B

— Mona (@Mona)1606060616.0

Ok. I am a big fan of @MSNBC & enjoyed every time I've been invited on their air. I have awesome respect for almo… https://t.co/95Iz0zZGGy

— David Rothkopf (@David Rothkopf)1606061449.0

Agree with exception: There is no "center right." It's like saying U R a "center Nazi." you are either enabling fa… https://t.co/Nc38WjPjMR

— Jodi Jacobson #BlackLivesMatter (@Jodi Jacobson #BlackLivesMatter)1606061519.0

@MattNegrin @Darla_jimswife @chucktodd @MeetThePress Todd’s “performance” was malfeasance of journalism. This was… https://t.co/IxEuZ8IiOA

— JohnAleshire (@JohnAleshire)1606059180.0

@mattmfm @MattNegrin Chuck Todd is a fucking disgrace.

— Adam Parkhomenko (@Adam Parkhomenko)1606058374.0

People like Chuck Todd aren’t presenting news. They’re covering politics as a game and critiquing strategies, legal… https://t.co/vIemyHZm9g

— Jared Yates Sexton (@Jared Yates Sexton)1606061729.0

@MattNegrin @Mobute @chucktodd @MeetThePress @NBCNews it is time for Chuck to go. This is reprehensible

— Robert Rikard (@Robert Rikard)1606062982.0

@MattNegrin @chucktodd @MeetThePress When we were flipping between channels during the election, I thought… https://t.co/nVpwGHxBFy

— Tara Brown Ⓥ (@Tara Brown Ⓥ)1606062345.0

Chuck Todd casually promoting conspiracy theories that undermine the election because of course he is. Dude needs… https://t.co/yIc4B76yZa

— Kaz Weida (@Kaz Weida)1606062810.0

Chuck Todd’s actual job is to let the GOP air their talking points on his airtime. He’s not “dumb” he’s not “bad at… https://t.co/67MG4lqo0J

— This is fascism and I reject it. (@This is fascism and I reject it.)1606061021.0

Chuck Todd is both the name of a television host and also a great suggestion of what MSNBC should do with him.

— Steve Hofstetter (@Steve Hofstetter)1606064182.0

FROM YOUR SITE ARTICLES

RELATED ARTICLES AROUND THE WEB

mma1120

fox is behind Trump’s conspiracy theory about the coronavirus death count

Over the final weeks of his campaign, President Donald Trump has begun casually accusing doctors and hospitals caring for COVID-19 patients of deliberately inflating the death toll to make more money. His baseless conspiracy theory appears to originate with one of his favorite Fox News shows.

Fact-checkers have traced viral misinformation about hospital payments and the COVID-19 death count back to an April 8 appearance on Fox News’ The Ingraham Angle by Dr. Scott Jensen, a Republican state senator from Minnesota and family physician. Another Ingraham guest repeated the claim in July.

The fact of the matter is that no evidence has emerged suggesting that medical personnel are fabricating COVID-19 cases. As a result of limited test capacity, such official tolls are a significant undercount of the actual number of deaths, as estimated from the number of excess deaths during the pandemic compared to a typical year.

Fact check failure: Chuck Todd aired Trump's conspiracy theory without debunking it.

Also: Right-wing media have been spreading lies and conspiracy theories about the COVID-19 death count all year long.

Finally: Texas Republicans have petitioned a federal court to potentially throw out more than 100,000 ballots cast in drive-thru voting in Harris County, Texas. One of the plaintiffs is right-wing commentator Steven Hotze, a QAnon conspiracy theorist who has said that the coronavirus is “much ado about nothing” and speculated that the “deep state could have been the ones that orchestrated this whole viral problem with the virus.”

===

Meet the Press hosted NBC News contributor and right-wing radio host Hugh Hewitt this morning. Host Chuck Todd did not disclose that Hewitt has a financial tie to President Donald Trump: Last month, the Trump Make America Great Again Committee rented Hewitt's newsletter to raise money twice last month.

Hewitt is a pro-Trump hack who recently tweeted that “every Catholic, indeed every person of any faith, has to realize the left despises them and that the Democrats shelter this virulent bigotry and pretend it’s something else” (Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden is Catholic). Hewitt also regularly turns over his radio program to guest host and unhinged bigot Kurt Schlichter.

ref no doc

https://www.mediamatters.org/hugh-hewitt/meet-press-and-chuck-todd-failed-disclose-trump-sponsors-hugh-hewitts-newsletter

nbc ...Chuck Todd did not disclose that Hewitt has a financial tie to Trump’s campaign: Last month, the Trump Make America Great Again Committee twice rented Hewitt’s newsletter to raise money.

Hewitt is the host of a program on Salem Radio Network, a columnist for The Washington Post, and a commentator for NBC News. He is a pro-Trump and Republican hack who recently tweeted that “every Catholic, indeed every person of any faith, has to realize the left despises them and that the Democrats shelter this virulent bigotry and pretend it’s something else” (the Democratic presidential nominee is Joe Biden, who is Catholic).

The Daily Beast reported last year on how “Hewitt has fallen in line with the rest of the conservative media ecosystem as a reliably Trumpian defender of the president’s bizarre and potentially criminal behavior.”

Hewitt also regularly turns over his radio program to guest host and unhinged bigot Kurt Schlichter.

Media Matters subscribes to Hewitt’s email newsletter, which is run by Salem and sends paid advertising. In September, “Trump Make America Great Again Committee, a joint fundraising committee authorized by and composed of Donald J. Trump for President, Inc. and the Republican National Committee,” rented Hewitt’s newsletter twice -- on September 2 and September 21 -- for fundraising emails.[doc] Trump messages state that they’re “brought to you by The Hugh Hewitt Show” along with the disclaimer: “Occasional messages from sponsors allows us to provide our content at no cost to you. This message reflects the opinions of the advertiser alone, and not necessarily the opinion or editorial position of Salem Media Group.”

Meet the Press host Chuck Todd did not mention Hewitt’s financial tie to the Trump campaign. During his appearance, Hewitt stated that “this has been a week of enormous relief. I've interviewed a dozen Republican senators and the vice presidential debate really turned it around for a lot of Republicans, as did the president's sort of powerful energy on conservative media, getting back out there.” He added: “I believe the president is down in double digits but closing nationally.”

Hewitt has also done advertisements for Keep America America, a project of the pro-Trump Job Creators Network that aims “to activate the conservative base and boost turnout.” (Meet the Press didn't disclose that financial connection either.)

Hewitt has had other conflict of interest problems related to former EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt; the Clean Water Act; and the anti-LGBTQ hate group Alliance Defending Freedom.

===

an 220

pence hit the Sunday talk shows without facing a single question about his abysmal HIV outbreak record

Laura Clawson / Daily KosMarch 2, 2020

Mike Pence talked coronavirus response on three Sunday morning talk shows yesterday, and boy, did CNN’s Jake Tapper andNBC’s Chuck Todd let him off the hook.

Mike Pence’s coronavirus clown show humiliates Trump — and endangers the rest of us

Heather Digby Parton / Salon March 2, 2020

Our vice president doesn’t believe in science — so he’s perfect to dispense pro-Trump lies and conspiracy theories.

https://www.alternet.org/2019/12/chuck-todd-needs-to-do-more-than-issue-a-mea-culpa/

no lnx

Chuck Todd needs to do more than issue a mea culpa

Written by Nancy LeTourneau / Washington MonthlyDecember 27, 2019

During an interview with Peter Wade for Rolling Stone, Chuck Todd admitted that he was “naive” when Kellyanne Conway referred to “alternative facts” on his show, Meet the Press.

The Ukraine story for me really crystallized it. And for good or bad, our show has been at the forefront of this. The first Sunday of the Trump administration is when the phrase, “alternative facts” was debuted. It was on Meet the Press Rudy that Giuliani used the phrase “Truth isn’t truth.” So look, whether we’d liked it or not, our platform has been used, or they’ve attempted to use our platform to essentially disseminate, or to sort of, what I would say, is lay the groundwork for this…

I fully admit, listening to you ask that question now, and me giving you the honest answer of, yeah, I guess I really believed they wouldn’t do this. Just so absurdly naive in hindsight.

Jay Rosen rejects the idea that Todd’s performance can be written off as naive. Instead, he calls it “strategic blindness.”

By “strategic blindness” I mean what people mean when they quote Upton Sinclair: “It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it.”

How naive could Todd have been during all of those months that Donald Trump was peddling the birther lie about Barack Obama as a way to launch himself on the national political stage? Where was Todd back in 2012 when political scientists Thomas Mann and Norman Ornstein wrote that “the GOP has become an insurgent outlier in American politics. It is ideologically extreme; scornful of compromise; unmoved by conventional understanding of facts, evidence and science; and dismissive of the legitimacy of its political opposition?”

Chuck Todd has been the political director at NBC News since 2007. He is heralded as an expert on the subject. And yet it has taken him until 2019 to grasp that Republicans have been manipulating him with their lies.

The interview with Wade was primarily a promotion for a special edition of Meet the Press on December 29 that will focus on the weaponization of disinformation. But as Rosen notes, nowhere does Todd talk about what he will do differently based on this new awareness.

So what will they do now? My answer: they have no earthly idea. This is what I mean by an epistemological crisis. Chuck Todd has essentially said that on the right there is an incentive structure that compels Republican office holders to use their time on Meet the Press for the spread of disinformation. So do you keep inviting them on the air to do just that? If so, then you are breaking faith with the audience and creating a massive problem in real time fact-checking. If not, then you just broke the show in half.

There is simply nothing in the playbook at Meet the Press that tells the producers what to do in this situation.

You might recall that, back in 2013, Todd famously stated that it was not the media’s job to correct Republican disinformation about Obamacare. Lest anyone assume that kind of thinking is limited to Todd, I would remind you that during the Scooter Libby trial, a Cheney press aide revealed that the Bush administration preferred going on Meet the Press with Tim Russert because it was “our best format,” a program where political handlers can “control the message.” Linda Hirshman explained why.

The Russert Test was a disaster because it rewarded people willing to lie unabashedly on TV.They lied because they could not truthfully defend their positions. But Russert’s famed “gotcha” research couldn’t catch them. Much has been said this eulogizing week about Russert’s hard-working ways assembling the material in advance of the show. Old metal. When someone told a new lie on Meet the Press, such as when Dick Cheney flat-out denied he had ever said that intelligence confirmed the Al Qaeda/Iraq link, Meet the Press had no procedure for producing the contrary evidence.

Lately I’ve been thinking a lot about how David Roberts coined the phrase “post-truth politics” to describe Republicans back in 2011.

Republicans thus talk about “taxes” and “spending” and “regulation” in the abstract, since Americans oppose them in the abstract even as they support their specific manifestations. They talk about cutting the deficit even as they slash taxes on the rich and launch unfunded wars. They talk about free markets even as they subsidize fossil fuels. They talk about American exceptionalism even as they protect fossil-fuel incumbents and fight research and infrastructure investments.

In short, Republicans have mastered post-truth politics. They’ve realized that their rhetoric doesn’t have to bear any connection to their policy agenda. They can go through different slogans, different rationales, different fights, depending on the political landscape of the moment. They need not feel bound by previous slogans, rationales, or fights.

In that endeavor, Republicans have had a willing partner in a media whose playbook was limited to viewing every issue from the two sides of the partisan divide. In the process, they abandoned the idea of seeking the truth. That allowed the GOP to traffic in disinformation and culminated in a president who has now told over 15,000 lies since being inaugurated.

While we all welcome Todd’s recent mea culpa, none of this gets resolved until the media finds a way to prioritize truth over balance.

Nancy LeTourneau is a contributing writer for the Washington Monthly. Follow her on Twitter @Smartypants60.

an 1219

no lnx

Cruz draws audible laughs on live TV after pushing debunked Ukraine conspiracy theory

Written by Igor Derysh / Salon December 9, 2019

Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Tex., drew laughs from the NBC News studio after he pushed a debunked Ukraine conspiracy theory on Sunday’s edition of “Meet the Press.”

Host Chuck Todd got into a combative exchange with Cruz after he claimed that Ukraine interfered in the 2016 election despite a Republican-led Senate investigation which found no evidence of Ukrainian interference.

“Do you believe Ukraine meddled in the American election in 2016?” Todd asked.

“I do,” Cruz replied. “And I think there’s considerable evidence of that.”

“You do?” a bewildered Todd asked, prompting laughter from inside the Washington studio.

“Senator, this sort of strikes me as odd, because you went through a primary campaign with this president. He launched a birtherism campaign against you,” Todd said. “He went after your faith. He threatened to ‘spill the beans’ about your wife about something. He pushed a National Enquirer story, which we now know he had a real relationship with the editors of the National Enquirer.”

“And Chuck, I appreciate you dragging up all that garbage,” Cruz complained.

“No, but senator, is it not possible that the president is capable of creating a false narrative about somebody in order to help him politically?” Todd asked.

“Except that’s not what happened. The president released the transcript of the phone call. You can read what was said on the phone call,” Cruz said. “Chuck, let me point out a game that the media is playing. You know, a question that you’ve asked a number of people is — you’ve said to senators sort of aghast, ‘Do you believe that Ukraine — and not Russia — interfered in the election?’ Now, that — that in a court of law would be struck as a misleading question. Of course, Russia interfered in our election. Nobody looking at the evidence disputes that.”

“But the president of the United States does,” Todd pointed out.

“Look, on the evidence, Russia clearly interfered in our election. But here’s the game the media is playing: Because Russia interfered, the media pretends nobody else did. Ukraine blatantly interfered in our election,” Cruz claimed. “The sitting ambassador from Ukraine wrote an op-ed blasting Donald Trump.”

“Do you know why he did that?” Todd asked. “What did Donald Trump — what did Donald Trump, as a candidate, say about Ukraine and Crimea during the election that might’ve inspired the ambassador?” Todd pressed, referring to Trump’s remarks about Crimea that alarmed Ukrainian officials.

“So you’re saying they had disagreements with Donald Trump,” Cruz said. “And they wanted Hillary Clinton to get elected.”

“OK, so they wrote an op-ed,” Todd said. “That’s the difference.”

Meet the Press

@MeetThePress

WATCH: @SenTedCruz says he believes Ukraine meddled in the 2016 election. #MTP #IfItsSunday

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President Donald Trump and personal lawyer Rudy Giuliani have baselessly alleged a far more nefarious Ukrainian plot, claiming that Ukraine — not Russia — hacked the Democratic National Committee and blamed the Kremlin.

Cruz’s joins senators like Richard Burr, R-N.C., John Cornyn, R-Tex., John Kennedy, R-La., and John Barrasso, R-Wyo., in pushing baseless allegations that Ukraine meddled in the 2016 election in recent weeks.

After the interview, Cruz accused Todd of “deliberately LYING” on Twitter and doubled down on his claim that “there’s significant evidence” of his allegation against the media.

Top officials who reviewed the evidence told Congress that this is not true. David Hale, the No. 3 official at the State Department, told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee last week that he was not aware of any evidence of Ukrainian interference in the election.

Fiona Hill, the former top Russia expert on the National Security Council, told the House Intelligence Committee last month that “this is a fictional narrative that has been perpetrated and propagated by the Russian security services.”

Cruz’s GOP colleague Sen. Mitt Romney, R-Utah, agreed that there was “no evidence” that Ukraine interfered in the election. And fellow Sen. Marco Rubio, R-Fla., told Politico that it is “important to distinguish op-eds . . . from the systemic effort to undermine our election systems.”

“There’s no way to compare any other efforts to what Russia did in 2016,” Rubio said. “There’s nothing that compares not even in the same universe.”

Former Rep. Charlie Dent, R-Penn., told CNN on Sunday that he was stunned by Cruz’s remarks.

“I can’t explain it,” he said. “You would think a man like that would have more self-respect. After all the things President Trump said about him and his family, you would think he would be out there trying to speak truth to power at a time like this.”

https://www.alternet.org/2019/12/gops-ted-cruz-draws-audible-laughs-on-live-tv-after-pushing-debunked-ukraine-conspiracy-theory/

Ted Cruz draws audible laughs on live TV after pushing debunked Ukraine conspiracy theory

Igor Derysh / Salon

Chuck Todd accuses GOPer John Kennedy of being ‘duped’ by Russia and spreading their propaganda in contentious interview

In a fairly contentious interview on NBC’s “Meet the Press,”…

https://www.alternet.org/2019/10/a-national-nightmare-is-upon-us-heres-what-happens-what-a-journalist-chooses-truth-over-balance

no lnx

‘A national nightmare is upon us’: Here’s what happens when a journalist chooses truth over ‘balance’

Written by Nancy LeTourneau / Washington Monthly October 9, 2019

Chuck Todd has often been criticized as a journalist for his adherence to bothsiderism. The most egregious example was when he blamed Democrats for the unpopularity of Obamacare and proclaimed that it wasn’t the media’s job to call out Republican lies. But here’s a more recent example.

Chuck Todd

@chucktodd

Let’s be blunt, our political parties are waging a “cold” civil war... And as ?@amyewalter? argues so well, each side rationalizes their bad behavior by pointing to the bad behavior of their “opponent”. The incentive structure punishes moderation https://www.cookpolitical.com/analysis/national/national-politics/war-never-ends …

The War That Never Ends | The Cook Political Report

The vote on Brett Kavanaugh is likely to be taken this weekend. But, the impact of the battle over his confirmation is likely to have short and long-term consequences.

cookpolitical.com

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That struck me as a form of gaslighting. But as Jay Rosen notes, something recently changed.

Jay Rosen

@jayrosen_nyu

Something has happened to Chuck Todd. I view @MeetThePress almost every week. Today his tone — I mean his voice itself — was different, as if the gravity of events had sunk in and his patience with denial had run out. Now go to 0:32 in this clip and watch.

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I would suggest that the change actually happened a few days before that interview with Senator Johnson.

Brian Stelter

@brianstelter

"Let's be frank: a national nightmare is upon us," @ChuckTodd said tonight. "The basic rules of our democracy are under attack, from the President."

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It was Trump’s statement that both Ukraine and China should investigate his potential political opponent that finally flipped a switch for Todd, leading him to announce that, “a national nightmare is upon us.”

The change in Todd hasn’t gone unnoticed by right wing media. After the interview with Senator Johnson, Mark Hemingway wrote about “Chuck Todd and the demise of true journalism.”

Chuck Todd’s first question to Johnson was about the Wisconsin senator’s statement that he “winced” at the suggestion that military aid to Ukraine was potentially linked to investigations into Biden family dealings in that country. Johnson pivoted to attacks on President Trump by the media and intelligence agencies over the last two years…

What Todd is telling viewers is that official investigations from Johnson’s committee, the Justice Department, and the attorney general are actually just outgrowths of a conspiracy theory.

After sighing loudly, Todd said, “I have no idea why Fox News conspiracy propaganda stuff is popping up on here.”

While Todd’s dismissal of Johnson was met with applause from fellow journalists, was this an appropriate stance from a newsman purportedly concerned with facts?

The Trump campaign and administration were investigated for several years both by an internal counterintelligence probe at the FBI and a powerful special counsel. Many apparent abuses of power at the FBI during that probe have been found and are being officially investigated.

The critical word from Hemingway comes in the last sentence of the first paragraph when he says that Johnson “pivoted” from the question Todd asked about his reaction to the news that military aid to Ukraine had been linked to the president’s demand for an investigation into his political opponent. The senator didn’t want to answer that question, so he “pivoted” to conspiracy theories about attacks on the president by our intelligence services. And yes, calling them “conspiracy theories” is an appropriate stance for a newsman concerned with the facts. To give them credence is to chose balance over truth, which is what the conspiracy theorists are counting on. It was because Todd didn’t comply that he is now being pilloried by the right.

Just to be clear, Senator Johnson is no stranger to conspiracy theories. For example, he warned about ISIS militants intentionally infecting themselves with Ebola and then traveling to the United States. He suggested that there was a “secret society” of FBI managers meeting offsite to plot their strategies to take down the president. Finally, he actually held a hearing to suggest that Medicaid expansion fueled the opioid crisis.

What Hemingway and Trump’s enablers want is for mainstream journalists to give as much credence to their conspiracy theories as they do to the truth. But as Thomas Mann and Norm Ornstein wrote back in 2012, “a balanced treatment of an unbalanced phenomenon distorts reality.” It appears that Chuck Todd has finally grasped that, when it comes to Republicans and Democrats, we are dealing with an “unbalanced phenomenon.” He’ll certainly pay a price for that awareness when it comes to Trump’s enablers and supporters, but he is standing squarely on the ground of good journalism.

Nancy LeTourneau is a contributing writer for the Washington Monthly. Follow her on Twitter @Smartypants60.

horner climate lawsuits

https://www.desmogblog.com/2019/01/26/competitive-enterprise-institute-climate-denial-target-nbc-cities-liability-suits

Competitive Enterprise Institute's Climate Denial Efforts Target Media, Cities Filing Liability Suits

By Guest • Saturday, January 26, 2019 - 03:47

Karen Savage, Climate Liability News. Crossposted from Climate Liability News.

The conservative think tank Competitive Enterprise Institute has been busily pressing forward with its mission to promote climate denial, using high-profile tactics like full-page ads in major newspapers. But it is also working behind the scenes, filing records requests to dig for information from cities filing climate liability suits and academics studying the topic.

As the science has grown definitive in tying global warming to the burning of fossil fuels, even oil companies have been forced to acknowledge the overwhelming scientific consensus and back away publicly from climate denial efforts. But CEI continues to double down on their mission to claim the science is not settled.

CEI made a splash this week by purchasing full-page ads in the Washington Post and Wall Street Journal taking issue with Meet the Press host Chuck Todd and NBC for refusing to give airtime to denialists during his Dec. 30 show about climate change.

The think tank has deep ties to the fossil fuel industry and has long worked to promote climate denial. And as municipalities have begun to sue fossil fuel companies, including Exxon, CEI has filed briefs and launched other campaignsdefending them.

According to Kert Davies, founder and director of the Climate Investigations Center, CEI’s most recent push is likely motivated by the increasing number of those lawsuits and investigations of the fossil fuel industry.

“CEI has a personal interest in how these lawsuits proceed because they had a contract with ExxonMobil Foundation from the 1990s — they got over $2 million through 2007 when Exxon abruptly dropped them,” said Davies, adding that he expects lawyers pressing suits against the company would want to see the contracts between CEI and Exxon during that period.

CEI’s tactics go beyond its attempts to sway public opinion.

Last year, CEIsued UCLA to obtain emails the organization said were exchanged between two UCLA climate law professors and state attorneys general offices involved in investigations of the oil giant.

An ethics complaint filed by another fossil fuel industry-backed group in December against then-New York Attorney General Barbara Underwood echoes areport written by CEI legal fellow Chris Horner. The report relied on public records requests to allege that attorneys general are involved in a coordinated scheme by private interests to hold oil giants responsible for climate change. That alleged conspiracy includes Massachusetts Attorney General Maura Healey, who is also investigating Exxon for possible fraud.

Horner has also filed information requests with municipalities filing suit against the oil and gas industry, including Richmond and San Francisco. In those requests, he is seeking records related to a climate litigation-related briefing he said took place at Harvard in 2016 between activists, private attorneys and public employees of various states’ attorney general’s offices.

In July, he requested communication belonging to staff members in the Rhode Island attorney general’s office, after it became the first U.S. state to attempt to hold the fossil fuel industry accountable for climate change by filing suit against 21 oil and gas companies.Horner’s request was for communication between special assistant attorney general Greg Schult, senior policy advisor Matthew Lenz and legal experts involved in climate litigation in other municipalities, including attorneyMatthew Pawa, Niskanen Center chief counsel David Bookbinderand director of climate policy Joseph Majkut.

Horner is also on the board of directors of the non-profit Government Accountability and Oversight, the organization behind Climate Litigation Watch, which posts public records obtained in an attempt to “expose the network of influence involving the litigation surrounding climate change.”

CEI has used full-page ads in major newspapers in previous campaigns to try to discredit climate action.

In one ad that appeared in The New York Times in 2016, CEI — along with more than 40 signatories — claimed that attorneys general across the country were abusing their power by attempting to silence the “debate” on climate science.

Between 1997 and 2014, those signatories and the organizations they representreceived more than $10 million from Exxon and the ExxonMobil Foundation and theyreceived more than $21 million from the Koch brothers, who have long funded climate denial efforts in support of their fossil fuel businesses.

Today, full-page ads in theWashington Post can cost $100,000 and more. Ads in the Wall Street Journal can top $325,000.

In a press release, CEI said the ads push back on Todd and NBC’s decision to “exclude guests who disagree with alarmists and calls for a real and open debate about the impacts of climate alarmist policies.”

“Sometimes, journalists like Chuck Todd are persuaded to join the activists in shutting down legitimate debate about policy issues and in those cases, we feel a duty to push back in defense of our rights and our policy positions,” a CEI spokesperson said in an email, adding that the organization’s requests for public records are made on their own initiative, and as part of this body of work defending their principles.

“Americans of all political stripes tune into NBC’s Meet the Press with the expectation that the great political issues of the day will be debated vigorously by guests representing a full range of viewpoints,” said CEI PresidentKent Lassman.

Because CEI does not disclose its donors, it’s unclear who is funding the current ads, but it has previously received funding directly from David Koch, as well as coal giantsMassey Energy Company andMurray Energy Corporation.

ExxonMobil was a publicly-acknowledged contributor to CEI for a number of years.

“In 2006, however, ExxonMobil publicly announced that it would cease its support for CEI and a number of other groups,” a CEI spokesperson said in an email.

NBC did not respond to a request for comment.

The ads fit into a long-running strategy to cloud the issue of climate science to the public.

CEI was named in a 1998 email to the American Petroleum Institute’s global climate science communications team as a possible funding recipient in a campaign to implement a “Climate Action Plan.”

According to that plan, “victory will be achieved” when people and the media are convinced there is significant uncertainty in climate science and “media coverage reflects balance on climate science and recognizes the validity of viewpoints that challenge the current ‘conventional wisdom.'”

Davies said in addition to potentially having to face an examination of its relationship with Exxon in the course of climate litigation, CEI has other concerns.

Davies pointed to a study published this week showing Greenland’s ice ismelting faster than previously thought and a recent Yalepoll showing that 73 percent of people in the U.S. understand climate change is occurring and 62 percent understand it is mostly human-caused.

“The evidence is in front of people, the weather‘s messed up, the climate’s messed up, the public opinion is moving away from CEI, and then they strike out at a national news broadcast for not including this extreme minority opinion that there’s nothing to worry about,” Davies said.

tip pt? gimmick? follow __ UK?

https://www.ecowatch.com/meet-the-press-climate-change-2624807867.html

NBC’s Meet the Press Devotes Entire Show to Climate Change With No Time for Deniers

In an unusual move for the Sunday talk show circuit, NBC's Meet the Press with Chuck Todd devoted its entire program Sunday to discussing climate change, and only interviewed people who acknowledge that it is a serious threat.

"We're not going to debate climate change, the existence of it," Todd said, as Mother Jones reported. "The Earth is getting hotter. And human activity is a major cause, period. We're not going to give time to climate deniers. The science is settled, even if political opinion is not." T[pix/vid?]his is a departure for Sunday talk shows, and for Meet the Press itself, Mother Jones pointed out. When the Trump administration released volume II of the Fourth National Climate Assessment over Thanksgiving weekend, Todd invited Danielle Pletka of the American Enterprise Institute and Utah Republican Senator Mike Lee, who both disputed the science behind climate change.

But this Sunday's show broke with that pattern. It featured full interviews with climate leaders, including outgoing California Governor Jerry Brown and former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg, as well as a panel with experts Dr. Kate Marvel, NBC's Anne Thompson, Craig Fugate, Michèle Flournoy and Florida Republican Representative Carlos Curbelo, the rare GOP member who pushes for climate action.

"We need to stop covering the debate and start covering the story, so that people see that this is real, and so that politicians take a more-pragmatic approach and find solutions that are actually achievable," Curbelo said.

In both of their segments, Brown and Bloomberg, who co-chaired the Global Climate Action Summit in San Francisco this fall, spoke of the need for the U.S. government to step up its action on climate change. President Donald Trump has denied the importance of the issue and promised to withdraw the U.S. from the Paris agreement to limit global warming to well below two degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels. Brown said he wished the president and Congress would worry more about transitioning away from fossil fuels than tariffs.

"I would point to the fact that it took Roosevelt many, many years to get America willing to go into World War II and fight the Nazis. Well, we have an enemy, though different, but perhaps, very much devastating in a similar way. And we've got to fight climate change. And the president's got to lead on that," Brown said, as NBC reported. [vid] Jerry Brown: Climate change is about inventing, 'not just adapting' | Meet The Press | NBC News]

Bloomberg also criticized Trump's stance.

"You know, I've always thought Trump has a right to his opinions. But he doesn't have a right to his own facts," Bloomberg said.

But Bloomberg also put pressure on whoever may challenge Trump in the 2020 presidential race, saying that climate change needed to be a major campaign issue.

"Any candidate for federal office better darn well have a plan to deal with the problem that the Trump science advisers say could, basically, end this world," he said, The Guardian reported. "I can tell you one thing, I don't know whether I'm going to run or not, but I will be out there demanding that anybody that's running has a plan."[vid?]

Bloomberg On 2020: Any Candidate 'Better Have A Plan' On Climate Change | Meet The Press | NBC New

The show also reported that the majority of Americans are starting to take climate change more seriously, pointing to a survey from the the Yale Program on Climate Change Communication and the George Mason Center for Climate Change Communication showing that 70 percent of Americans think climate change is happening and 57 percent think it is human caused. The polling, and the show, follow two years of extreme weather events from hurricanes to wildfires. NBC's Anne Thompson said that more Americans were beginning to believe in climate change because, "We're starting to live climate change in real time," Meet the Press reported on its Twitter feed. AROUND THE WEB

no lnx vid

ref 11/18 shamed to do rt thing?

https://www.esquire.com/news-politics/a25304542/meet-the-press-climate-change-chuck-todd-danielle-pletka/

arely do you get news of an ongoing catastrophe and, within a couple of days, a perfect example of why we've done nothing about that exact problem. But Chuck Todd and Meet The Press were happy to oblige this Thanksgiving weekend. On Friday, the Trump administration attempted to bury a harrowing U.S. government climate-change report by releasing it on Black Friday, a notorious dumping ground for bad news. Normally, though, the bad news is just for the current administration—not the whole world.

On Sunday, Todd hosted Danielle Pletka of the American Enterprise Institute on his teevee show. Her performance—and it was a performance—was a shining example of how the ruling class has successfully hemmed and hawed for decades, with the full support of the feckless Beltway media, slowing any kind of action and safeguarding big-business profits while experts in the field have known full well that human civilization as we know it is in clear and escalating peri[vid]

...Right-wing panelist on Meet the Press on climate change: "I'm not a scientist ... We need to also recognize we had two of the coldest years, biggest drop in global temperatures that we have had since the 1980s, the biggest in the last 100 years. We don't talk about that."

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As Pletka so happily volunteered, she is not a scientist. So why was she invited on one of the nation's Premier Political Talk Shows to spread disinformation about a scientific issue? That two years since 1980 have been cold does not have any bearing on the scientific consensus that climate change is real and man-made. This member of the conservative intelligentsia—the American Enterprise Institute, for which Pletka works, is a right-wing "think tank"—is actually just making the more polite version of President Good Brain's argument on Wednesday:

Donald J. Trump

@realDonaldTrump

Brutal and Extended Cold Blast could shatter ALL RECORDS - Whatever happened to Global Warming?

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This is not the first time Trump has disproved global warming on the basis he is cold today. (Elsewhere, he has simply called it a Chinese hoax.) Nobody put this crap to bed better than Stephen Colbert did all those years ago. Weather is not climate. The weather is affected by changing climate patterns, but warming global temperatures over the decades—an indisputable trend, even among denialist hacks like Pletka—does not mean every day of every year will be warmer than the previous. What it does very likely mean is more powerful storms that drop trillions of gallons of water on American cities, and bigger, more ferocious wildfires that turn the American West to ash.

Of course, Pletka probably knows this. She gave Our Beautiful Boy Chuck Todd that tried-and-true conservative line that's rapidly going stale: that surely something is happening with the climate, but who can say whether humans are causing it? Well, after years of exhaustive study, scientists have found it is "extremely likely" (terms the scientific community does not choose lightly) that humans are significantly contributing to warming global temperatures. We also know that the Beautiful, Clean Coal that Pletka suggested the U.S. has switched to does not exist. "Clean coal" is a misleading term for the same coal that continues to be the dirtiest fossil fuel in existence.

Did Todd challenge her with the facts? No. But this is what the evidence says. It's just Pletka isn't concerned with gathering the evidence and coming to a conclusion—also known as the essence of the scientific method. Here is an (albeit anonymous) account from an Atlantic reader who claims to have worked for Pletka at the American Enterprise Institute:

A number of years ago I worked for Danielle Pletka for a summer as a researcher, and her piece today matches the "scholarship" she and AEI were producing in the early part of this decade. I was rarely if ever asked to perform background research on a subject but was more often asked to provide specific evidence to support ready made assertations. At the time AEI was mobilizing in support of military action against Iraq, and it was quite clear to me that the academic process was reversed - positions designed, research dug up to support the positions.

This seems like an opportune moment to mention that Pletka is widely known as a varsity-level cheerleader for the Iraq War. More recently, she demonstrated her intricate knowledge of the conflict by suggesting to the French ambassador on Twitterthat France had joined the U.S. in the conflict. OK, so that was completely and laughably wrong (Remember the idiotic Freedom Fries charade?), but at least by 2013 she was...still defending the invasion. Yes, after it embroiled the region in sectarian conflict, and after all the reasons people like Pletka peddled for going in were proven to be baseless. Eventually, this genius foreign-policy move led to the rise of ISIS. This is just another example of how, if you work in the Beltway, there are absolutely zero consequences for being completely wrong about everything.

In fact, if you work at a think tank like AEI, it might just get you a raise—if you stick to the party line. All think tanks are, to some extent, mouthpieces for their donors, but that particularly goes for a right-wing gun-for-hire shop like the Institute. The Guardian uncovered how AEI works to undermine the science on climate change in 2007:

Scientists and economists have been offered $10,000 each by a lobby group funded by one of the world's largest oil companies to undermine a major climate change report due to be published today.

Letters sent by the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), an ExxonMobil-funded thinktank with close links to the Bush administration, offered the payments for articles that emphasise the shortcomings of a report from the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). Travel expenses and additional payments were also offered.

And what did that ExxonMobil funding look like?

The AEI has received more than $1.6m from ExxonMobil and more than 20 of its staff have worked as consultants to the Bush administration. Lee Raymond, a former head of ExxonMobil, is the vice-chairman of AEI's board of trustees.

You may remember that Exxon was also exposed as having discovered, through the work of its own scientists, that climate change was real as early as 1977. Instead of accepting this reality and beginning the work of responding to the burgeoning climate crisis, Exxon chose to fund disinformation on the topic for decades, protecting their profits in the shorter term. They're not alone among oil-and-gas outfits, many of which simultaneously started building their rigs to accommodate sea-level rise that would result from the climate change that, in public, they steadfastly disputed was happening.

One way to fund disinformation is to pay a think tank like AEI to spread it for you. And that's what Pletka was still doing, on Sunday, after just the latest report dropped detailing the catastrophic consequences of our inaction on the climate crisis. The U.S. report focused on the fact that the crisis will melt 10 percent of the American economy and send it crashing into the ocean by 2100. Farmers in the midwest will lose 75 percent of the crop yield on their corn. Rising sea levels will put trillions of dollars in coastal real estate in jeopardy. But last month's report from the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change—compiled by 91 leading scientists from 40 different countries based on more than 6,000 scientific studies conducted by still more scientists—was even more apocalyptic. It found that human civilization as we know it will be in severe peril by 2040, and that we have 12 years to dramatically change course to avoid that scenario.

Amid all that, news programs like Chuck Todd's Meet The Press—offerings that putatively exist to inform the public about the world around them—are still playing host to people who are paid to spread false information about the world. Todd is not alone: CNN hosted Rick Santorum on Sunday. Like NBC News, which employs Pletka as a contributor, they pay Rick directly to spread nonsense.

...his Week talked about the climate report for two minutes with Sen. Amy Klobuchar and noted that the administration tried to bury it.

The report did not, from what I can tell, come up on the rest of the hour-long show...[vid]

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Here's paid CNN commentator Rick Santorum praising the Trump administration for trying to bury the climate report, arguing that climate change is made up by scientists trying to make some money pic.twitter.com/lBpLMexgt9...

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This festering boil on the body politic highlights another in-vogue conservative argument: that the scientists who've devoted their lives to studying the climate are really just in it for those juicy government grants to continue studying it. It's all about the money! As usual in this era, this is a case of accusing the opposition of something you're already up to.

Santorum is applying the incentive structure that exists for massive multinational oil and gas corporations and those they employ—seeking out certain findings because you have a vested financial interest in a certain outcome—to climate scientists. In reality, the kind of conspiracy that right-wingers like Santorum are alleging here would be perhaps unprecedented in scale. If this is all a big con, thousands of climate scientists spread across dozens of countries would need to all be getting their kickbacks, and have a way to secretly stay on-message. It's absurdly unlikely, and it belies the aforementioned way that the scientific community vets a scientific report's findings.

Oh, and the money in government grants ain't actually that good. That's why some "scientists" might take, say, $10,000 from AEI to dispute the scientific consensus. It's all bullshit, folks, and it's bad for ya.

...ay that the nation's major television news stations routinely play host to propagandists who are paid, directly or indirectly, to spread disinformation and muddy the waters to protect the interests of massive energy corporations, all at the expense of the future of human civilization.When Pletka said emissions are down since President Trump withdrew from the Paris climate accords—making the U.S. the only nation in the world that refuses to participate—that was just true enough: they are down in 2018, though the rate of emissions reductions slowed from the previous two years and will likely continue to slow as the Trump administration attempts to roll back our efforts to combat the crisis. The crown jewel in that regard is the Clean Power Plan, our main vehicle for meeting our obligations under the Paris agreement, which Trump has sought to repeal. At the very least, Todd is obligated to challenge this crap if he's going to host a dishonest broker—or host someone who can. According to John Whitehouse of MediaMatters, none of the Sunday Shows hosted a single scientist while covering the climate in 2016 and 2017.