Three moments, actually:

--NBC's Chuck Todd yesterday on Meet the Press (12/10/11), commenting on Mitt Romney and Newt Gingrich:

Well, first of all, those are a couple of nimble debaters. They are pretty good.  I think we have seen it.  This is the final two.

I'm old enough to remember when Todd had the campaign narrowed down to a Top Three, way back in August:  "We have a top tier. It is Mitt Romney, Rick Perry and Michele Bachmann."

--ABC host Diane Sawyer, asked to describe (This Week, 12/11/11) the most revealing lesson she learned about the candidates after she moderated a debate this weekend:

The vitality on the stage. We said at the beginning the marathon run it is to run for president. But I have to tell you, first of all, they have great immune systems.... They came out strapping, they came out ready.... I think you can't always experience on television just the sheer physical vitality of all these candidates.

--The New York Times reports (12/11/11) that a story about Newt Gingrich featured an anonymous source rebutting criticisms of him. Turns out that source was... Newt Gingrich.

Even though Mr. Gingrich publicly insists that he will take the high road with a positive campaign that does not criticize other Republicans, he recently strayed from that vow, offering himself as an anonymous source in a New Hampshire newspaper last week to reply to criticism by John H. Sununu, a former aide to President George H.W. Bush who, as a Romney surrogate, has called Mr. Gingrich "untrustworthy and unprincipled."

Mr. Sununu told the newspaper, the Union Leader, that Mr. Gingrich supported a tax increase deal that the first President Bush made with Democrats in 1990, then reversed himself. The newspaper, quoting a source identified as "a senior aide in the Gingrich campaign," elaborately rebutted this account.

[Gingrich spokesman R.C] Hammond said the source was actually Mr. Gingrich, who did not want to be identified to avoid the impression he was getting into a fight with the Romney camp.

The New York Times had a headline on Saturday that read, "Imagining a Christie Campaign for President."

That seems appropriate--if we're talking about how it's the corporate media doing the imagining.

On ABC's This Week (10/2/11), Jonathan Karl announced that New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie's speech at the Reagan Library "was  the most electrifying event of the campaign so far."

That speech was treated like a big event on the NBC Nightly News (9/28/11), with anchor Brian Williams saying up front that Christie is  "the man whose every word is being watched and listened to so very carefully." Reporter Chuck Todd--you know, the voice of the voiceless--explains that there is a "twist" in the presidential race:  "Chris Christie opened the door a crack to running for president."

What does that mean? Apparently he didn't say he's not running:

It's what New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie did not say at the Reagan Library Tuesday night that froze the Republican presidential race in place. He didn't say no.

In the NBC segment, Christie tells people to go check out a Politico story--which is a compilation of all the times he's said he's not running for president. Which kind of sounds like he doesn't think he's running for president, right?

And if that doesn't convince you, surely this will:

TODD: But when an audience member pleaded with him:

Offscreen Voice #2: I mean this with all my heart. We can't wait another four years to 2016. We need you. Your country needs you to run for president.

TODD: Christie stopped joking and left an opening.

Gov. CHRISTIE: I thank you for what you're saying and I take it in and I'm listening to every word of it and feeling it, too.

TODD: Everything about Christie's speech screamed national campaign.

Everything except, you know, the part where he says he's running for president.

I caught this MSNBC commercial last night featuring their own Chuck Todd, explaining (apparently) how he thinks about his job:

My job is to bring up issues that Americans care about.

It's my responsibility to ask the tough questions. No matter who's leading the country, they need to be held accountable.

I have unique access to the president, his advisers, the candidates and members of Congress.

I'd better use that access for a greater good. Use it for people who can't get through the White House gates. For people who can't be heard.

The American people deserve answers.

Huh. The Chuck Todd I see on television is more like this, this, and this--and don't forget the time he met a journalist (Jeremy Scahill) who actually does work that resembles Todd's self-description. Scahill appeared on a TV show panel with Todd, and criticized him for saying that investigating Bush-era torture policies would be a distraction. Off the air, Todd told Scahill that he shouldn't be so impolite:  "You sullied my reputation on TV."

I guess my question is this: Does Chuck Todd have another job? One that more closely resembles this description of a fearless truth-teller, giving voice to the voiceless?

NBC (Nightly News, 7/19/11) did some polling to see what the public thinks about the Republican and Democratic positions on the budget and debt ceiling :

CHUCK TODD: Now, look, any sort of deal is putting pressure on the bases of both parties. For Republicans, a large majority of the country is telling Republicans get off the no new taxes pledge and compromise, 62 percent.

TEXT:

NBC News/The Wall Street Journal

Should Republicans Compromise?

Agree to Raise Taxes

Yes 62%

No 27%

TODD: But inside those numbers, tea party supporters, 65 percent of them say to Republicans, "No. Stick to your guns and stick to that pledge."

As for Democrats and entitlement reform, look at this one. A majority, 52 percent of everybody we tested, said to Democrats, "Stick to your guns and don't allow cuts in Medicare and Social Security for deficit reduction."

TEXT:

NBC News/The Wall Street Journal

Should Democrats Compromise?

Cuts to Social Security & Medicare

Yes 38%

No 52%

TODD: So as you can see, it's a mixed political bag for both parties, but particularly for Republicans.

So 62 percent of those polled said Republicans should compromise, while the opposite proportion--38 percent--said Democrats should do the same. That translates into a "mixed bag" for both parties--that is, if corporate media are doing the mixing.

Will the unfolding crisis in Japan lead to a debate over the safety of nuclear power in the United States? Initial signs are not encouraging.

NBC's Meet the Press (3/13/11) had an interview with Marvin Fertel of the Nuclear Energy Institute. Host Chuck Todd prefaced one question with, "I understand that you represent the industry's interests in this...."

Later on the show, Sen. Chuck Schumer (D.-N.Y.) was asked to weigh in--since he had been speaking out in favor of nuclear power, a position he doesn't appear to be abandoning:

Well, we're going to have to see what happens here. Obviously, it's still, still things are happening.  But the bottom line is, we do have to free ourselves of independence from foreign oil.... So I'm still willing to look at nuclear. As I've always said, it has to be done safely and carefully.

 On the CBS program Face The Nation, Sen. Joe Lieberman (I.-Ct.) was on to say:

I've been a big supporter of nuclear power because it's domestic. It's ours and it's clean. And we've had a good safety safety with nuclear power plants here in the United States. But I think we've got to--I don't want to stop the building of nuclear power plants, but I think we've got to kind of quietly--quickly put the brakes on until we can absorb what has happened in Japan.

ABC's This Week, to its credit, had Joe Cirincione of the Ploughshares Fund. He also appeared on Fox News Sunday--which featured pro-nuke Sen. Mitch McConnell (R.-Ky.) right afterward.

In the New York Times today (3/14/11) we see the headline "U.S. Nuclear Industry Faces New Uncertainty." But the article only quotes proponents of  nuclear power.  The lead graph:

The fragile bipartisan consensus that nuclear power offers a big piece of the answer to America's energy and global warming challenges may have evaporated as quickly as confidence in Japan's crippled nuclear reactors.

So we hear from a member of that "fragile" consensus (which never included "mainstream environmental groups," as the article claimed). Is the Times planning on running a separate piece detailing the concerns of critics of the nuclear power industry?

The Washington Post has a similar Reuters piece (3/14/11) headlined, "Some Nervously Eye U.S. Nuclear Plants." The lead sentence:

Anxiety over Japan's quake-crippled nuclear reactors has triggered calls from U.S. lawmakers and activists for a review of U.S. energy policy and for brakes on expansion of domestic nuclear power.

But the only quotes come from nuke boosters: Joe Lieberman, a spokesperson for the Nuclear Energy Institute and a White House spokesperson. If there really is "anxiety" and calls from "activists," readers should hear them.

Wrapping up a panel discussion (10/31/10) on Barack Obama's post-midterm political challenges, NBC reporter Chuck Todd raised the possibility that the Beltway debate on Afghanistan might change:

On Afghanistan, the Democratic caucus that will be left, you brought this up, is going to be a very liberal caucus, very anti-war caucus. This is going to be a political challenge for him like no other.  And by the way, a lot of these Tea Party conservatives have all talked about "We don't want to be there forever" in these debates.... They're all like, "I don't want to be nation builders." There may be a bipartisan majority on Afghanistan in Congress, but it may be to start speeding up by the fall.

I find it rather unlikely that there will be many Republicans who will support troop withdrawals from Afghanistan. But let's say they did. Would this affect how Meet the Press covers the Afghan War debate?  NBC's Sunday show has tilted strongly in favor of war supporters, even as public support for the war has dropped considerably. It's not a stretch to think that, no matter what happens in the elections today, Meet the Press will still mostly want to hear from the hawks--and only the hawks.

For those of you not following right-wing non-stories, there is a mini-scandal brewing over something called JournoList, a now defunct private email list started by a liberal blogger named Ezra Klein. It came to include something like 400 members, many of whom were other liberal bloggers, academics and pundits.

Someone leaked many of the emails on the list to the conservative Daily Caller website, which has since run several stories alleging that the messages on the list amounted to a liberal media plot to coordinate their coverage in support of Barack Obama. The only problem is that the messages don't show that ever happening, unless you happen to think that political opinions expressed by politically opinionated people are the stuff of conspiracy.

Nevertheless, there are some in the media who are taking this story very seriously. (I know--a right-wing pseudo-scandal getting serious coverage--stop the presses!!)  Politico columnist Roger Simon writes a lengthy piece (7/28/10) about how journalism was once a "holy calling," but things like JournoList--a "Frankenstein monster"--have contributed to the degradation of the profession.

Simon quotes NBC's Chuck Todd, who has been similarly wounded by this completely contrived tale:

Journolist was pretty offensive. Those of us who are mainstream journalists got mixed in with journalists with an agenda. Those folks who thought they were improving journalism are destroying the credibility of journalism.

This has kept me up nights. I try to be fair. It’s very depressing.

Really? He can't sleep because of this?

I'm all for journalists feeling in some way responsible for the reputation of their profession. In that spirit, I wonder if the media's coverage of the Iraq War keeps Chuck Todd up at night, many billions of dollars and hundreds of thousands of lives later? Does Andrew Breitbart's destruction of a community organizing group--aided by credulous media coverage--bother him much?

I know these issues are not as important as private emails exchanged between liberally-minded writers....

Feel free to list your own examples of media failures that SHOULD keep Chuck Todd up at night in the comments thread.

One of the items enumerated in Glenn Greenwald's round-up of "Various Matters" for Salon (9/4/09, ad-viewing required) addresses how NBC's "Chuck Todd this week noted the series of petty scandals the right has been manufacturing and remarked: 'The ability of some conservatives to create media firestorms is still much greater than liberals these days'"--which viewpoint Greenwald calls out as really

reflective of one of the more irritating media syndromes: their tendency to talk about media coverage as though they have nothing to do with it and can't exert any influence over it; media coverage is just something that happens to them. During my interview with Todd a couple of months ago, he said:

Now you're getting--this has always been something that I've been--not to go off on a sidebar here--but I've been waiting for somebody, during the campaign, to ask both candidates. Because both of them, in the general elections, and frankly even during the primary with then Senator Clinton, all said that the Bush administration tried too hard to expand executive powers. And then you would say, which executive powers are you willing to give up? And none of them would actually say which executive powers, because once you're president you don't want to give up any of your powers.

He was "waiting for somebody" to ask the presidential candidates which executives powers they would relinquish. It's as though someone forgot to tell him he works at NBC News. It's very common for media stars to lament how the media covers petty stories or otherwise distorts them--as though someone is forcing them to do it and they have no agency.

Explaining that "if the right is better at 'creating media firestorms,' that's due to what 'the media does," Greenwald goes on to ask, "does anyone ever wonder why the right would be better at that if we had a Liberal Media?"

Independent journalist Jeremy Scahill (The Nation, Democracy Now!) appeared on HBO's Real Time With Bill  Maher alongside NBC White House correspondent Chuck Todd.  Because Jeremy isn't the type to let such an opportunity to go to waste, he used some of his time to castigate the corporate media for failing to question the White House about the reliance on private contracting firms like Blackwater in Iraq and Afghanistan. And he also brought up Todd's opinion that investigating Bush-era abuses would be a distraction.

Scahill shared with Salon.com's Glenn Greenwald what happened off camera:

Right as we walked off stage, he said to me, "That was a cheap shot." I said, "What are you talking about?" and he said, "You know it." I then said that I monitor msm coverage very closely and asked him what was not true that I said on the show. He then replied: "That's not the point. You sullied my reputation on TV."

You can see part of their exchange on the show here. If Scahill repeating what Todd said is "sullying" his reputation, then didn't Todd really sully himself?

Asking his readers to "remember" that, on NBC, Chuck Todd "is billed as a reporter covering the White House, not a pundit expressing opinions," Salon's Glenn Greenwald (7/15/09, ad-viewing required) examines a Todd appearance on the MSNBC show Morning Joe "discussing reports that [U.S. Attorney General] Eric Holder is likely to appoint a prosecutor to investigate Bush torture crimes. Needless to say, everyone agreed without question that investigations were a ridiculous distraction from what really matters and would be terribly unfair":

In response to virtually every media criticism (at least the few they acknowledge), establishment journalists will insist that their role is to be steadfastly neutral. They simply report on the debates, not take sides or express opinions about them. Taking one side or the other is not their role. Only partisan ideologues do that.

Yet here is Chuck Todd--who covers the White House for NBC News--explicitly arguing against investigations, and adopting the Bush/right-wing mentality to do so. Investigations are a distraction from what matters. It's extremely unfair to hold lawyers accountable when they authorize criminal conduct. It's "dangerous" for one administration to investigate the prior one where that prior administration had its DOJ lawyers authorize what was being done.

Wouldn't the standard claim of establishment journalists maintain that Chuck Todd shouldn't have (or at least not express) opinions on these topics? Yet here he is--as so many establishment journalists routinely do--explicitly advocating against investigations of Bush-era crimes. Even more notably, the arguments in favor of such investigations merit no mention whatsoever.

Reasonably asking, "Would anyone listening to this discussion even have the slightest idea what the arguments are in favor of investigating and prosecuting?," Greenwald can only conclude that "the notion that these establishment journalists don't choose sides and are mere honest brokers of debates is, rather obviously, transparent fiction."

Read the FAIR magazine Extra!: "The Media Ignore Their Core Duty: Arianna Huffington & Glenn Greenwald on Media Accountability" (9–10/08).

Want to know if "the media did a great job" covering Barack Obama's second major presidential press conference? Jason Linkins says (Huffington Post, 3/25/09) you can "just ask the media! Because they'll tell you!"

But "at the same time, the media is also quick to point out that the press conference was 'totally boring!'" Among those bemoaning what Linkins deems "certainly a strange coincidence" is NBC's chief White House correspondent Chuck Todd, who thought that "more than anything else, Obama's news conference last night resembled a campaign TV ad," and asked, "how many times did we hear Obama mention his budget's top priorities: education, energy, healthcare, reducing the deficit?" Linkins' reply:

Indeed, HOW MANY TIMES DID OBAMA TALK ABOUT THE BUDGET? Jesus, it was almost as if he kept getting questions about the budget. In fact, it was ALMOST AS IF Jennifer Loven, Jake Tapper, Ed Henry, Chip Reid and Chuck Todd himself asked a bunch of questions about spending and budgets! Was it like a "campaign TV ad"? Hmmm. I wonder if that's because Obama spent a lot of time, on the campaign trail, patiently explaining his budget priorities, amid approximately a million billion questions about "HOW WILL YOU PAY FOR THESE THINGS?"

Yes. It's the repetition of perennial questions--questions whose answers, offered long ago, were so satisfying to voters that they voted in accordance with their satisfaction--that BORED, thunderously.

Linkins' "look at the breakdown" of questions put to Obama yields "a pattern" in which "'traditional' media outlets brought the repetitive, dull, blunt force trauma, and the smaller, less-called-upon outfits provided the evening's flavor," with questions on such interesting and important topics as violence in Mexico, homelessness and stem cell research.

From the end of the NBC Nightly News (3/3/09):

CHUCK TODD: And finally, let's close with Michelle Obama. Amazing numbers for a new first lady. Sixty-three percent positive rating. What makes it more remarkable, six months ago you and I were talking about at the Democratic Convention, she might be a liability if he's not careful. She's no liability.

Wait a second--you mean that some of the inane chatter heard in corporate media has no relationship to reality?!?! That is "remarkable."

Tom Brokaw, the interim host of NBC's Meet the Press, and NBC analyst Chuck Todd expressed bafflement on last Sunday's Meet the Press (10/26/08) at how Latinos had "turned on the Republican Party" and their "friend" John McCain:

TODD: I mean, this, this Hispanic--one of the things we--underreported story of the cycle is how Hispanics have just turned on the Republican Party, hurting John McCain. Frankly....

BROKAW: Who is a friend of theirs.

TODD: Who is a friend of theirs.

BROKAW: Right.

TODD: You know, this is a Shakespearean--you know, the S...

BROKAW:  Right.

It's hard to know exactly where Todd was going in identifying this as "Shakespearean"--perhaps he was likening Latinos turning on and "hurting" their "friend" McCain to the famous scene of betrayal in Julius Caesar, in which the Roman leader's friend Marcus Brutus collaborates in Caesar's assassination?

The analogy suggests that, even as the GOP presidential campaign sputters, McCain is now facing treachery from the very people who were his allies.

Et tu Jose and Maria?

Where would Latinos be if they didn't have pundits like Todd and Brokaw to let them who their friends are!

Back in the real world, where issues have an impact on how people vote--it would appear that the pundits may have the story completely backwards. A new report from the Center for American Progress suggests that Latinos actually stand to lose out economically under McCain's economic policies.

But then, pundits have rarely been known to let actual issues get in the way of their horserace storyline.