Correction: The author of this piece erroneously referred to Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez as a Senator, which is wrong, when she is in fact a member of the House of Representatives. The Automatic Press regrets this error and has sent all of our subscribers an immediate full refund in regards to their yearly subscriptions. We here pride ourselves on accuracy and so have shattered the shins of the author to ensure that he really gets the message. ~ PDF Rafferty, Disciplinary Editor.
So the first Democratic debate took place last night. Full disclosure: I didn’t watch it. I’m recovering from some kind of virus and frankly don’t need any other threats to my health, mental or otherwise. When I do watch these things it’s usually more for their inherent entertainment value than anything else and to build a mental list of the dumbest things a candidate says. Back in 2015 that award went to a leg of ham who boasted about killing a Viet-Cong guerrilla.
Remember that? Those were good times.
I can’t comment on anything the candidates said during this debate and don’t want to. No doubt I’ll be hearing all about it for the next week on social media. But what I do want to comment on, something which most fortuitously fell into my lap this morning, is this:
In a debate featuring no less than 200 candidates NBC moderator Chuck Todd, who I’ve been told is some kind of reporter, spoke about as much as Elizabeth Warren—an actual candidate and possible front runner.
So I need to make this clear: I like journalism and as such I hate Chuck Todd. I’ve hated him for a very long time. All it took was one look at his face to know what I was dealing with. But it’s not enough, and one mustn’t forget shallow, to judge a person’s character merely on their shitty face. But sometimes you see someone’s face, make a quick judgment, and it turns out you’re right. This happens to be one of those cases.
And as it so happens it turns out I’m not the only one writing about Chuck Todd because of all this garbage. The Huffington Post published an article today calling him the biggest loser of the debate. But the headline, “Everyone Hates Chuck?” is tragically long overdue and should need no question mark. You should have hated him as soon as you saw his face, just like I did.
I can’t say for certain what percentage of the 1633 words Chuck Todd spoke yesterday were stupid. After all I didn’t watch the debate. Was it 80 percent? 100? I’ll be generous and wager that it was closer to 70 percent. But again, I don’t know. Maybe someone else does.
Either way Chuck Todd has a long history of saying stupid things as well as editorializing. Below I will take a look a two of the more egregious examples of this behavior in the recent past. The first has to do with concentration camps and the second with my old friend Lindsey Graham.
If you go to Chuck Todd’s Wikipedia page one word you will not find is “pundit.” Nor will you find much evidence that he’s ever been considered an opinionist. The words you will find used to describe him are “television journalist” and “correspondent.” And while I’m not generally one to defend the notion of objective journalism I would bet pretty hard that Chuck Todd is and that he considers his pronouncements to be so.
So consider this rant he embarked upon after House Representative Ocasio-Cortez referred to ICE’s concentration camps on the border as “concentration camps.” First of all, at least as far as I am concerned, such a designation is accurate. They are camps into which people are rounded up and concentrated, as it were. But Chuck Todd took such offense to this statement that he took time out of his day to shame the representative from New York. It’s almost a surprise he didn’t actually say, “For shame Ocasio! For shame!”
“But here’s where it’s upsetting as her comments. Some Democrats have been reluctant to condemn her remarks and don’t want to get criticized on Twitter. Fellow New York Congressman Jerry Nadler tweeted in response: ‘One of the lessons from the Holocaust is ‘never again’ … We failed to learn that lesson when we don’t call out such inhumanity right in front of us.’
Jerry Nadler surely knows migrant detainment camps are not the same as concentration camps. So why didn’t he just say that? Why are we so sheepish calling out people we agree with politically these days? Obviously, this isn’t a Democratic thing. It’s an even bigger problem on the Republican side of the aisle when it comes to President Trump and the reluctance there.
Are we really so ensconced in our political bubbles, liberal versus conservative that we cannot talk about right versus wrong anymore? Some things are bigger than partisanship. Or at least they used to be. And in the interim, the crux of what’s truly at stake is lost: What is this country going to do about what’s happening at the border in this humanitarian crisis?” –Chuck Todd, Scum of the Earth
Some things are bigger than partisanship; concentration camps, for example. Imagine being dumb enough to think that semantics are the greatest problem in politics today. Imagine that you’re Chuck Todd. For Chuck really the largest crime a person can commit is to be uncivil. We’ll get to that later.
Now let’s take a look at the Merriam-Webster dictionary’s definition of concentration camp:
“…a place where large numbers of people (such as prisoners of war, political prisoners, refugees, or the members of an ethnic or religious minority) are detained or confined under armed guard —used especially in reference to camps created by the Nazis in World War II for the internment and persecution of Jews and other prisoners“
You’ll notice in the above definition that the term is used “especially in reference to camps created by the Nazis” not “exclusively.” And you’ll also notice, if you click on the above link, that the term was first used in this connotation in 1897. I can’t say for certain but I’m pretty sure that was before World War II.
Everyone of course, even Chuck Todd, is entitled to the occasional rant. What would life be without those?
But what Chuck is not entitled to is shitty reporting. Far worse than his regrettable statements on concentration camps is this interview with Lindsey Graham. It’s a fairly infamous interview in which Graham uttered, in his characteristically confused sounding drawl, “I didn’t even know there was a thousand troops in Niger.” Now, I consider Graham to be pretty stupid, and it’s not unbelievable that he would somehow fail to know this vital information despite being on the appropriate committees, having numerous high-ranking friends in the armed services, having been to AFRICOM meetings, there having been books written on these things, etc. But Graham was probably lying.
Anyway, it was earlier in the interview that Chuck delivered his greatest disgrace. Graham was making an uncharacteristically intelligent point on Trump’s foreign policy and the various officials he had placed in charge of it. The argument, essentially, was that Trump’s isolationist rhetoric on the campaign trail was not reflected in his cabinet or national security council. It’s an important point, really, because there remain many people who take Trump at his word that he’s a non-interventionist (his track record on non-intervention exists only if you fail to include economy crushing sanctions; it’s more likely that when it comes to war Trump is merely too lazy to want to prosecute one fully).
About halfway through making this statement Chuck interrupts him to say, “That’s on substance and that’s fine—but when did civility become an ideological issue? When this idea, ‘no, no, no, it’s more important to be pugilistic. It’s more important to land that punch.’”
A better question, one that should be posed to Chuck, is, “why do you care about civility?”
Other good questions would be, “Why are you in journalism? And who let you do this to us?”
Because, really, what kind of journalist would rather talk about “civility” than substance, anyway? What is so interesting about that? I’d like the reader to sit back for a moment and meditate on that statement: “That’s on substance and that’s fine.” Let it roll around in your brain. Imagine interrupting someone with that statement in your own daily life. Say, perhaps, they are telling you about their engagement. How would it go over?
But does any of this matter? It’s certainly enjoyable to make fun of Chuck Todd. But let’s keep in mind for a moment that most freelance journalists can hardly make a living doing their actual work and must supplement their income with second or even third jobs. So how much does Chuck, our relentless and fearless muckraker, earn per year? If the internet is to be believed—and I’ll admit it often isn’t—his yearly salary as of 2017 was about $700,000. The average hourly pay of a freelance writer is $23.90. So assuming one works eight hours a day, every day including weekends, for an entire year your average freelance writer could expect to earn a whopping $69,788 before taxes. If we want to get into semantics about this we can use this statistic which is exclusively for freelance journalists. Here you can see the average annual salary is estimated to be roughly $10,000 less than the former figure, in which hours were inflated. This, one might say, is a wee bit short of $700,00 per year.
But Chuck’s been in the business a long time, you might say. So have many other journalists who make nothing near $700,000 but have in fact contributed something valuable to society over the course of their careers. This is an achievement Chuck Todd cannot claim.
But one thing he can lay claim to is an exclusive spot in this website’s newly minted Trash Hall of Fame. Congratulations, Chuck. You have truly entered the big leagues now.