By MATTHEW STOSS
GW Magazine / Summer 2019

Chuck Todd fears the future.

The Meet the Press host wonders what’s going to happen if willful derangement continues to define U.S. politics — although, he concedes, what’s left of the planet might just melt before any of us see if politics gets worse or better.

In July, Todd, who attended GW in the early 1990s, chatted with GW Magazine about what it’s like to be a journalist today. Occasionally exasperated and reluctantly fatalistic, all while suppressing a cynicism that feels more and more rational, Todd covered the flourishing new age of partisan media, the fight for any bit of objective truth and how close journalism (and us) might be to calamity.

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What’s it like to cover politics today?
It certainly feels a lot different than it did just four years ago, which is a lot different than it did four years before that.

Sometimes I think when you’re in the middle of it, you don’t fully appreciate the massive changes that are taking place. You sort of deal with the incremental, in the moment. You don’t appreciate what is actually taking place until a few years later and you’re like, “Oh wow, I think I know what happened.”

So for instance, we’re in a place now — and part of this goes back to the essay I wrote in The Atlantic [in September 2018] — where I think there has been a campaign against the media and journalism in general. It was mostly from the right for a generation. Basically, it’s what I grew up with. My entire lifetime has seen this. It started at the end of the Nixon era when I was born, and you could argue that it’s culminated today in this modern conservative echo chamber. But it has successfully, I think, put the press more in the crosshairs. There have been other times when the press has been caught in the middle of plenty of political disputes and plenty of issues, but I do think with partisanship so acute, there’s this idea that information itself is part of the warfare. It’s just made a unique challenge.

I wish I could fall back on some historical context to know how another generation of journalists dealt with similar situations, but I don’t think we’ve had a similar situation. I think we’re all just feeling our way around right now, but it is definitely changed. I think who watches and engages with political media has changed and I think we’re still trying to figure out what journalism is going to look like in the next decade.

During the Nixon era, you had a handful of television networks, radio, and the major newspapers, and that was about it. At that point, all of those entities pretty much agreed, more or less, on what was happening. Today, you have I don’t know how many other outlets, and there’s competition for a perspective —
Well, there’s competition for facts. This is the problem. It used to be there was a competition for ideas. Now we have a competition for facts, and I think we have such a fear of losing that competition that it has changed almost how some people engage in journalism. This is our biggest challenge yet.

Just the fact that there’s a competition for the truth — for facts right now. In a way, that sounds alarmist when I say it out loud, you repeating it back, but what else do you call it? How would you round that edge? But it does feel like that’s where we are right now, and you have a group of consumers who have made a decision on what to believe based on what culturally makes them comfortable, not on the merits of whether that news organization has been right or wrong more often than not. It’s, “Oh, no, no, no, no, no, but they get me, so I believe that.”

Have you made adjustments? Have you seen adjustments in the field?
We’re so much more combative in some ways with people today, and I think people think we’re not combative enough, but I think in some ways we’re much more antagonistic collectively as a press than we were just five years ago, and you know what? That, I think, is kind of healthy.

I came to my own sort of philosophical zen about this a few years ago, at the beginning of the Trump administration. It was like, look, you’ve got to make a decision. You can do your job, and you realize when you do your job, you’re going to make people mad and people aren’t going to like you, and you have to get over the personal. I think the problem with too many of my colleagues is they worry too much about their social media likes, and I think that there are too many people that are trying too hard to please a group of people — and there’s comfort in pleasing a group of people. You have to make adjustments and accept the fact that you’re going to make people mad, and you’re going to make people mad in different ways.

I didn’t know it was going to come in the form of death threats and I didn’t know it would come in the form of character assassination and things like that. That just sort of comes with the turf if you’re going to cover American politics in the 21st century right now, because it’s brutal with what’s happening. Those of us that care about keeping this Fourth Estate held up a little here, I think we have to prove that we can cover this honestly and fairly and aggressively and knowledgeably.

We covered the [2016] campaign as a referendum on Donald Trump when it was a referendum on Hillary Clinton. We should’ve framed the election the way the voters framed the election. We were framing the election in our point of view. We had dealt with Donald Trump. We realized what we were getting in Donald Trump because I think we all knew him better than the public did, especially those of us who had covered him for a long period of time. But that wasn’t what the voters were doing.

In political journalism, you can’t tell the voters how to think. You gotta, at times, also report what they’re thinking, too. Voters were having a different conversation. For them, it was a referendum on Clinton, but it was a referendum on Clinton for even different reasons than we thought. It was a referendum on the establishment. It was a referendum on the politics of the last 25 years. It was a referendum on that. We were framing it another way than the voters were framing it.

I think that Trump’s personality so consumed the press corps that we missed that big of a reminder. And the fact is is that clues were all over the place. Bernie Sanders crushed Clinton in places like Michigan and Wisconsin, so then we’re surprised that she can’t cover places like Michigan and Wisconsin. You know what I mean? It’s not as if it wasn’t staring us in the face.

What are your thoughts on 2020 and how it’s going to go for the media?
I want to be careful, in that I think it’s pretty consequential. Meaning, I think the future of journalism as we know it is actually at stake in some ways.

Look, in the 19th century, our media was very partisan. There’s a reason why there are all these legacy newspapers that have Democrat and Republican in their name. Some communities were three newspaper towns. There were the Whigs, the Republicans, the Democrats. That was the primary means of political communication then, and I think there’s a chance that we’re going to go much deeper down that road, depending on which direction things go.

Here’s what I do know: The losing party is going to go through a set of recriminations that we have never seen before. The internal fighting in that party — it will drag the press into it in some ways — but the losing party is just going to have, an epic, epic civil war.

You talked about facts. It used to be, at least the way I thought about it, that people were afraid to look bad or get caught lying, and that offered some recourse for journalists because their subjects’ reputations held them accountable.
That’s right. What was our ability to get results? We shamed people. What happened? What did Trump hack? How did he hack the system? By being shameless. If you don’t feel shame for your actions, and the bad press doesn’t bother you or you can live with it or explain it away — that is Trump’s superpower. I don’t know if another politician can pull it off. Every other politician that has tried to be as aggressive as he can be sometimes, denying what is obvious, it has not gone well for them.

Now, politics is a copycat industry. And if Trump succeeds a second time — one term is an anomaly, but two terms would be: You’ve got to emulate. There are two things that will make the next four years, 2021 through 2025. I can’t fully envision how it’s going to work but I know it’s going to be nuts. Either Trump loses and as an ex-president constantly backseat tweets America and basically stays the general of his army, completely keeping the Republican Party at odds with itself, or he wins and the Democratic Party starts to have splintering aspects to it that say, “You know what? Maybe we’ve got to start fighting fire with fire,” and we start to see tactics that we condemn today being embraced. Whoever is winning, somebody is trying to copy how they did it and do it again. That to me is what makes 2020 so consequential, because the fallout for the losing side has major implications for my industry but also major implications for how politics is practiced and how honorable politics is or isn’t over the next decade.

Where would journalists fit in that? To me, it seems like there’s very little good faith left. Even the spokespeople they put out, while they’re on TV, you could show video of them saying something contradictory, and it wouldn’t faze them.
My concern about all this is that you’ll see more and more journalistic organizations pick a side. So you might be really good at reporting on the Democratic or Republican Party civil war from liberal or conservative points of view, but trying to cover their policy proposals more honestly, your own point of view might get in the way. That is, I think, where you run into some problems — where policy coverage can look very propagandist very quickly if it doesn’t look like you’re challenging it at all.

My concern is that more journalists and more organizations decide it’s financially better to go down a partisan road because you have a built-in audience. My concern is that the financial incentives for journalists over the next 10 years may pull them in a more partisan or a more ideological direction, and that is just going to make it where everybody asks, “Are you a journalist on my side? Or are you one of those journalists who covers the other side?” and where everything becomes an antagonistic relationship — and it isn’t clear where legacy media fall in this. We’re the ones that end up looking like dinosaurs because, at the end of the day, our business incentive is still to have a broad audience. But if your incentive is to have a niche audience, which of course is what social media and cable have created, then that moves you down a certain road, and especially if the politicians decide that’s how they want to roll. Then you can see how this becomes radically different in a decade. Not to say it will.

I think that there is a silent middle, and that’s who I believe my audience is on Sunday morning. The Sunday morning audience is a lot different than the cable audience, and I think your Sunday morning audience is people who generally care about being citizens but also worry about their mortgage, worry about their kids going to school, worry about basic safety in their neighborhoods, things like that, and they watch once a week to just sort of keep up. They probably have a traditional lean that they vote, but they’re not real hard-charging ideologues or partisans. They’re just trying to get along. I still think there’s an audience that wants a certain type of coverage, but they don’t watch TV all day and they don’t go on social media all day. I think another thing that is happening is that you end up writing for who is reading, and the more you write for who is reading, the more it’s likely to go deeper and deeper down rabbit holes.

Do you think that politicians and political operatives have exploited the “both sides” idea?
Oh god, yes, I do. Look, I think the politicians have done more to exploit division here than anybody, not the voter, not the press. They know exactly what they’re doing whenever they play the game of going on Fox [News] to do one thing. It is a bit exploitive. You’re caught in a bind because on one hand, you can sit here and say it’s totally obvious what they’re doing. And you can say on the other hand, there’s a part of me, as a person who’s working for the public airwaves, who feels obligated at the same time to let this person have their say—it’s like you’re exploiting my goodwill. You’re exploiting my aspiration that I believe Sunday morning is supposed to be a certain type of thing. So I get frustrated by this. And I do think the worst actors are the politicians who know what’s happening and are taking advantage in order to deflect criticism. They’re just taking advantage of the fact that they know how to provoke.

I imagine that that must be incredibly annoying — the good faith/bad faith thing. Is there a way to make that better? It just seems so futile sometimes.
It’s funny you put it that way. That does get frustrating. At the end of the day, I’m pretty cynical, but I don’t like to be as cynical on TV as I am because I know there are genuinely people who believe what that person is saying and they take it to heart. So I try not to be that cynical, and yet, you’re like: They’re totally playing you. But do I have the credibility to say it, or say it that way if I’m actually defeating the purpose of what I’m trying to point out? If I pointed it out, oh, well, you get some cheers from one side going, “Yeah, way to call them out!” But what have I accomplished? I’ve instead played into this narrative of what they want to say, which is the media is hostile toward the right. These are the landmines that I think about: Which landmines are worth trying to step on and which ones are worth avoiding?

Has anyone been blacklisted? At some point, you’re watching and it’s like, why are you even putting this person on TV? It seems like it becomes more damaging to interview them than it does to not.
Here’s the thing: The answer is yes. There are people who have been on a “we’re not booking them anymore” — or “we’re not booking them for a while” list. But I would never tell you who they were and I would never tell you they were permanently banned, because at the end of the day, I think about two things. No. 1: the public airwaves. I do technically work for broadcast airwaves, right? Second: If there are people who regularly mislead, but they are the only people with information perhaps that you want to share with your viewers on a particular Sunday, you can’t [ban them]. So the fact of the matter is, yeah, it matters.

We don’t keep bringing people back that are regularly disrespectful to the viewer or disrespectful of us. I’ll just leave it at that. I would never publicly say it. I think it’s been a mistake by some of my friends and colleagues who have publicly said it because I just think: Why draw attention to yourself? I know the counterargument would be: Well, how are you going to teach a lesson to the others if they know that? Yes, I take your point, but we are in a very hot-take atmosphere, and it’s like, you know what, I do want to avoid being the story if we don’t have to be the story.

What I was building toward with that is the journalist’s role to act as a filter. Certain things in the past were just so nuts, they wouldn’t get covered, like some flat-Earther yelling. That sort of thing would get filtered out. But today with so many outlets, something that is a fringe and wrong idea can very quickly go mainstream. That’s where I was going with the certain people you wouldn’t book, or you wouldn’t quote if you’re a print journalist. I’m wondering if the mechanism of acting as a filter for bad ideas has been damaged.
You know who first discovered this problem was Eli Pariser. He wrote a book [The Filter Bubble] about seven years ago sort of warning of this siloed news culture that we were all about to head into. It’s just a small book but it was just really thoughtful on this issue. He was the first person to get at this problem. He said to get the fringe, crazy ideas before the internet, you had to go basically to the high end of AM radio. That’s where you found it if you were looking for crazy ideas. Or maybe a newsletter you subscribed to or you also got a certain magazine or something. And then the internet came, and the example he used was the 9/11 truthers. I’m sure there were Pearl Harbor truthers back in the day. You laugh but I’m —

It’s a gallows laugh because I’m sure you’re right.
I’m sure they existed but we didn’t know about it, and you know, my god, if you think about every major event that’s happened in our history, the more people that have access to media, the more conspiracy theories have gotten mainstreamed, if you think about it — whether it’s the Kennedy assassination or the moon landing.

The point is that the internet allows people to think, and social media allows people to think and Reddit allows people to think — you name it, you can find like-minded individuals no matter how cuckoo you are, and it makes your cuckoo seem less cuckoo when you get to hang out in the community of like-minded individuals. And then, who are the cuckoo people? So I do think it is that much easier. And it’s funny. I’ve seen, particularly in the conservative echo chamber, the way these conspiracy theories start to creep in. They almost all back their way in. They start in talk radio, they back into primetime on Fox and then seep their way onto the news side of Fox. That’s how it moves. There isn’t a similar place on the left that can move it as efficiently as the right does.

I was building back toward the idea of there being no common reality. If you’re arguing with or debating or interviewing, for example, a flat-Earther, it’s going to inevitably end at: “The world is flat.” “No, it’s not.” And there’s just nothing you can do about that. And when I’ve seen interviews on TV and read them in the newspapers, that seems to be the problem. If you can’t agree the world is round, there’s nowhere else to go. So you’re fighting the ultimate uphill battle.
There is a dystopian future that it sounds like you’re concerned about — that I’m concerned about — that I’d like to think isn’t going to happen, but it’s more possible than I think we realize.

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