Meet the Press host Chuck Todd has a list of banned guests “who regularly mislead,” but he’s not telling viewers who they are.
“The answer is yes. There are people who have been on a ‘We’re not booking them anymore’ or a ‘We’re not booking them for a while’ list,” said Todd, arguably the most prominent political journalist on TV.
But, he added, he won’t permanently ban those he said mislead viewers because sometimes they are the only officials with information he needs.
In an interview with George Washington University’s summer issue of GW Magazine, Todd balked at identifying those on his lists.
“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 the broadcast airwaves right?” he said.
“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,” he added.
Todd has said that he won’t put “climate deniers” on his show.
In the interview, Todd said in the Trump administration era, the media has become more combative, and he’s good with that.
“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,” he added.
He also said that the public didn’t look at Trump’s election the way the media did despite knowing Trump better than most.
“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,” he told GW.
He said that the media was so “consumed” with Trump’s personality that the press missed what was happening in the election where Hillary Rodham Clinton was expected to win. “Clues were all over the place,” he said, adding, “It’s not as if it wasn’t staring us in the face.”
