Mess the Press

Meet the Press with its original host, Martha Rountree, via Eyes of a Generation.

Happy Boxing Day!

A lot of talk going on about the belated discovery of Chuck Todd, political director of NBC News and current host of Sunday morning's ancient Meet the Press, that the Trump campaign and administration are untruthful sometimes and may be doing it on purpose, as reported the other day in Rolling Stone. Chuck Todd is shocked—shocked!

It looks as if this unexpected insight arose from an earlier incident, also reported in Rolling Stone, when Todd was interviewing Senator Cruz on his show:

In re Bobbleheads

It'd kill you to put her on once? Photo by John Shinkle/Politico.

“I think that for a 78-year-old senator, he . . . remains a strong and important voice in American politics and a relevant voice in American politics,” says Feist, whose “unscientific” analysis is that McCain hasn’t been appearing on CNN more recently than he has over the past couple of decades (fact-checkable!). (Via Erik Wempel at WaPo) 

That's it! It's the qualifier, "for a 78-year-old senator". There's some kind of weird obligation to feature a senator who was born in 1936, and McCain is the most strong, important, and relevant one who makes the cut?

Edgy Wedgie

[Producer Deborah Turness's] new vision for “Meet the Press” includes adding a regular panel of journalists who will question guests, something of a return to the venerable show’s original format. “The show needs more edge,” she said. “It needs to be consequential. I think the show had become a talking shop that raked over the cold embers of what had gone on the previous week. The one-on-one conversation belongs to a decade ago. We need more of a coffeehouse conversation." (New York Times)

My proposal for a truly edgier Meet the Press:

PROJECT BELTWAY

The show becomes a kind of reality series in which a group of, say, 10 contestants from the worlds of politics, industry, the military, and the press, etc., try to persuade Heidi and a panel of judges (Cokie Roberts, Ralph Nader, and Howard Stern) that they have what it takes to brand themselves as survivable in the hothouse atmosphere of Washington—a balance between avant-garde and commercial, friendly and freezing, smart and fart.

HEIDI: You know how it is in politics. One day you're in, and one you're out. Right, Cokie?

Each week they perform a different task—trying to have a conversation with John McCain, drafting a budget balancing agreement, eating their way down the midway of the Iowa state fair, and so on, changing with the political seasons. Tim counsels them through, and they ignore him at their peril.

TIM: I'm not sure you should be writing a book about Martin Luther King, Governor Huckabee. Shouldn't you open yourself up to a bigger color palette?

MIKE: I know what I'm doing, Tim. You'll see.

TIM: Well, make it work!

And then on Sunday morning—well, you see what I mean.

Rhetorical Questions Department

Can't find a credit for this painter, evidently 20th-century and perhaps Mormon? It depicts Jesus teaching a very young, bearded McCain to waltz in the water, for some dream-logic reason in the Verde river near Sedona.

Nicole Belle at Crooks & Liars on Sunday morning:

So why on earth is John McCain on my screen again, for the tenth time this year?

What the hell is that? Lack of imagination? Lack of creativity? Or is it more likely a lack of interest in having any kind of real conversation or discussion of the issues?

My vote is the latter.

This negative view is undoubtedly correct, but it cannot answer the question completely, since it would be easy to have a television program with no real conversation or discussion of the issues without John McCain. Indeed, a lack of real conversation and discussion of [jump]

Sunday morning getting down

Digby Village Hall, North Kerstevens, Lincolnshire.

Cokie Roberts came up with something. No, really, on a subject she is no doubt passionately interested in, that of who gets invited to Sunday morning talk shows, in the context of Marco Rubio's unprecedented feat yesterday of appearing on seven different programs, which has obviously set certain pulses racing: Chris Cilizza, of the Washington Post's The Fix (Is In) with a video mashup, Adam Clark Estes of The Atlantic Wire ("basically every Sunday morning talk show known to man") , and so on.

We-all on the Upper Left Side have our own ways of discussing the phenomenon, based on the well-respected though unproven hypothesis that the Sunday talk [jump]