Meet the Press stepped way over lines that no journalist should cross without a consequence. If Brian Williams’ penchant for embellishment was a big enough infraction for NBC to take him off the air for a few months and not bring him back to the news division, then Chuck Todd, as the network’s political director, should be fired.

If telling a fib here and there merits punishment, then what Todd took part in merits the ultimate punishment for not only failing to maintain a standard of ethics on the job, but injecting a serious defect in personal ethics into it.

NBC’s most serious problem, as we’ve now found out twice, is that the network doesn’t seem to have an internal guidance system that checks for balance, or provides input on matters of ethics. There should have been someone on Todd’s team to put the brakes on running the segment. Failing that, there should have been someone above Todd, separate from the show, with the knowledge and authority to nix it.

Showing a segment with Black convicts talking about their experiences with guns, three days after the Charleston Massacre can only be interpreted as willful and racist reductionism of the same kind that is used by people who bring up Black on Black violence whenever police brutality is the topic of conversation. I am not allowing for any benefit of the doubt. The decision whether or not to broadcast this segment was revisited after the Charleston Massacre happened. Chuck Todd and his team decided to go ahead after weighing the pros and cons of “race and perception.” Clearly, the ramifications were well-understood. This is a racist behavior and it has no place in a major news network.

Then, while in conversation with the panel, Todd said:

https://twitter.com/KimBrownTalks/status/612643657552916480

Which leads one to ask oneself where Chuck Todd gets off being the arbiter of who can and cannot talk about race. White privilege is a serious problem. Todd needs to address it away from a TV camera.

Failures like this one, after Brian Williams’ suspension and return as an entertainer, don’t inspire confidence in the quality and trustworthiness of NBC as a news network.

The segment below is the last Meet The Press segment I will watch so long as Chuck Todd is an employee at NBC.

‘Meet The Press’ Shows Anti-Gun Montage Of All Black Shooters Following South Carolina Rampage | ThinkProgress

BY SAMANTHA PAGE
JUNE 21, 2015

While the country — and South Carolina, in particular — is once again debating racism in America, NBC’s Meet the Press on Sunday offered a video of men in prison expressing regret for their own gun violence. All of the men in the video are black.

The segment was part of Sunday’s show, which focused on the recent killing of nine black people at a bible study group in Charleston, South Carolina. The alleged shooter, Dylann Roof, is accused of making racist statements during the rampage and in an online manifesto that describes black people as “stupid and violent.” He has been seen in photos online holding a Confederate flag andwearing the flags of apartheid-era South Africa and white-ruled Rhodesia, now Zimbabwe.

“The circumstances you are about to see are very different from the racist violence in Charleston,”Meet the Press host Chuck Todd said in the introduction to the video.“But their lessons remain important, and we simply ask you to look at this as a colorblind issue,” he said.

“The last thing we wanted was to cloud the discussion of the topic,” Todd wrote on the NBC website after receiving a wave of negative feedback on social media about the video.

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