On Wednesday Nov. 20, NBC’s Chief Political Analyst and former moderator of Meet The Press, Chuck Todd, mic’d himself up for an interview in the Umphrey Lee Center. He’s a seasoned professional in the political reporting world with credits at the National Journal’s The Hotline and NBC. In September 2023, Todd stepped away from the moderator’s chair on Meet the Press but still explores the world of politics as a political analyst for NBC and on his aptly named podcast: The Chuck Toddcast.

Todd joined SMU-TV’s Sydni Walker and The Daily Campus’ Katie Bergelin to explore the current state of journalism, the relationship between the government and the press, and see if there’s hope for a more unified country in the face of divisiveness.

But before we even began recording the on-camera interview for SMU-TV, Todd noticed the camera placed just outside the camera’s view. That camera’s purpose: to capture a tight shot of Todd. Of course, just the sight of that camera set off a journalistic history lesson about 60 Minutes and their strategic use of the tight shot. It was the best mini lecture of my life.

Chuck Todd: 60 Minutes, if you ever watch, if you really want to see how you can send a message without using words. 60 Minutes is the only show left that uses the power of the close up to sort of force viewers to focus. It’s very much a deliberate thing that Don Hewitt, who founded the show, came up with because it was a words program. You don’t have a lot of visuals. You know, it’s no fun for the person, right? You feel like everybody’s looking at you but that’s the point. You see every expression and you know if somebody’s bullshitting, you just do. Honestly, I don’t think TV does this stuff enough.

Katie Bergelin: Now that you mention it, I’m going to look out for that more. I always watch Sunday Morning, and I never see that [tight shots].

Todd: Sunday Morning is very careful. They’re very intentional with their cuts. I had a friend of mine who went over to work at CBS. He said he had to retrack a piece 15 times, and I think he said he may have retracked 15 times in his entire career at NBC. Those two units at CBS in particular, they are producer television shows. They are for the producer.

Bergelin: When you stepped down from Meet the Press, you mentioned it was a privilege to explain America to Washington but also explain Washington to America. Now as candidates may forgo the traditional news media interview and opt for untraditional outlets to interview, do you think that impacts how traditional news media outlets are able to make that connection?

Todd: You know, when Bill Clinton was first elected president, it was a big deal that he went on a program called Arsenio Hall and played the saxophone. It became this ‘Oh my God! We’ve never seen our presidential candidates show anything that is human.’ Richard Nixon went on a popular show, Laugh In, and did a cameo. We’ve been shifting to non-traditional media ever since traditional media started, meaning there’s always something new. Larry King was an interview program that no politician used to go on and then all of a sudden, one successfully did it and then a whole bunch of them did it. Joe Rogan is likely going to do the same thing. He goes from being this failed sitcom actor, a stand-up gameshow host and then all of a sudden he’s relevant for a time. I’m not as convinced that this is a new theory.

Look, the politicians should go everywhere. They shouldn’t pick and choose. Picking and choosing is how you end up, I think, costing yourself political opportunities. Donald Trump’s 2015 and 2016 strategy is still the best media strategy I’ve ever seen any candidate do. He said yes to everything. And it may seem like a disaster, but he was talking to more people than his opponents were at any given time. So, the mistake I think political candidates would make after this election is assume you only should go to non-traditional media. There’s still a whole bunch of people who, by the way, vote more regularly than not, who are going to go to your traditional sources. I kind of think major news organizations should have their own Joe Rogans. They used to, that’s what Johnny Carson was.

Sydni Walker: You hear a lot today about post-election, “I’m done with the news for a while,’ especially regarding political news. Do you think that it’s possible to avoid that?

Todd: Usually, when one side loses, that’s the side that says they’re taking a break from the news. We saw the same thing happen after 2020. A lot of conservatives took a break from Fox. This is not a new phenomenon. You will have something that ‘brings people back’ or they start paying attention. I’ve done this long enough where I realized every party that thought they were down and out forever came back.

I do think the merging of culture and information has certainly made it probably impossible to ‘hide from the news’ the way social media works. Our information stream is almost as important as our blood to us these days, so I can’t imagine how you avoid it.

Bergelin: In this past election, we saw Republican wins sweeping the country. Democratic governors, like Gavin Newsome, have come out saying they want to be this “blue line” against Trump’s policies. Is that effective at all or can Democrats do something to be that blue line?

Todd: Different flavors of Democrats are going to try different things. If Gavin Newsome came out and said, ‘It’s time for me to reach red America. I need to spend more time in places like Texas, Kansas and Oklahoma,’ nobody would believe him. Where is he going to be the most credible in trying to be a power player in the Democratic Party? He’s the governor of the largest blue state, so he’s the head of the resistance. That’s, for him, the safest place for him to be politically and maybe acquire some power. Now I don’t happen to believe that’s a good idea. I think the biggest mistake Democrats made in 2020, and I think Republicans are about to make now, is assuming they won. They won not because of who they are, they won because of who they weren’t. I think the next successful Democrat is the one that actually tries to talk to those voters instead of trying to become the resistance.
Bergelin: If you’re not talking about California being this spearhead of democratic policies, what about these other states that may have Democratic governors but they’re not to the point where California is?

Todd: Let’s say Colorado. Colorado’s, I think, a blue state that has a libertarian streak. There’s also some red states with libertarian streaks like Montana. It’s a red state but anytime it gets too evangelical or too right, they didn’t come back. Colorado’s the same way. I have a feeling he’s going to navigate the Trump era pretty well. If you’re more of an activist governor of a deep blue state, the governor of Illinois, California or even New York, I think you’re going to do this differently. You got to meet voters where they are and there were a lot of voters who showed up and said, ‘I don’t like the way the government’s working for me,’ so I think if you come in fully in resistance mode, you won’t have any credibility.

Walker: Do you think there was a failure to meet voters where they are? I know Bernie Sanders talked a lot about the Democratic Party [failing to meet voters where they are].

Todd: I 100% believe that. I think tactically, there are things that she [Harris] could have done differently to get close in Pennsylvania. Pennsylvania, Wisconsin and Michigan were all so close that you could win them on tactics alone. Maybe if she [Harris] had literally three more weeks, so Biden gets up three weeks sooner. Maybe that’s the difference. She doesn’t win the popular vote but she might have won the electoral college just by winning those three states.

I go back and I think the Democrats lost this [the 2024 election] when Barack Obama endorsed Hillary Clinton. Barack Obama won because he wasn’t Hillary Clinton. There was a force inside the Democratic Party that said she’s too establishment. By the way, both Joe Biden and Hillary Clinton ran against Barack Obama and lost, and then he ends up tapping both of them, in some ways, as potential heirs rather than somebody younger, somebody outside the system, literally the most experienced people in the system. Then about half the Democratic Party that was in the Obama base gravitated to Bernie Sanders, who, at the time, was not taken seriously inside the Democratic Party. I do think when you look at the ‘Bernie Bros,’ they’re now ‘Trump Bros’ today. Joe Rogan was a Bernie supporter and now he’s a Trump supporter.

And this goes back to how you meet voters where they are and I would argue the Democratic Party didn’t. It’s not lost on me that they’ve lost the popular vote just three times since 1988; twice it was Massachusetts liberals and once was the San Francisco Democrats. Those are the two most liberal brains you can have in America and where did they struggle the most, in places just outside those areas.

Bergelin: As two young professionals looking to enter into a career in journalism, how do you think young journalists meet this moment where the incoming administration has been actively hostile towards journalists? How can journalists stand up to that?

Todd: You’ve got to stick to some core principles. If you know truth and transparency have mattered to you with administration X, they should matter in administration Y. If you’re an access journalist, you are putting yourself in a very dangerous place because in access journalism, you only report based on your relationships and if it’s only relationships that are the source of your reporting, then you find yourself having to gravitate to power. The real problem is we’ve lost local news and national media will never, ever get its trust back if local media doesn’t have the trust of the local population.

We don’t cover national news through a local prism. In fact, we do the opposite. Now when local news is covered, it’s covered through a national prism. Somebody makes a stink at a school board meeting about something that is not happening in that community, but is happening five communities over because they saw it on cable news. That is the crisis we face. We’ve got to repair locally but the repair on the local front needs to be seen as the better place to be covering national news through a local perspective. It used to be something that you took pride in. You’re the leading political reporter in your community, you understand the nexus between local and national. We took all of that away.

We need to get better about helping people live their lives, and as a journalist, you should be seen as a public servant that helps people live their life. We need more of a shared community experience. We can’t be red and blue. We got to be community by community that happens to bring red and blue together. I think local sports, youth sports, high school sports, these are common interests that cut across red and blue. Anytime you can cover and cut across red and blue, you can succeed as a journalist.

Walker: Accidentally inform them. I like that.

Todd: People that want to be informed are going to get informed. The problem we want is to inform those who have other interests in their life. And by the way, I’m not telling them they have to be news jockeys. Our job is to get them accidentally in our feeds because we offer them something else. Fine, you come to me because you get access to some coupons. Okay, great, I’ll accidentally inform you.

Walker: People say journalism is a watchdog of the government. How would you define watchdog and would you change that definition going into this administration?

Todd: No. I think that ultimately we count on journalists to be watchdogs. Ultimately, here’s what I go back to: a good journalist shouldn’t be popular or unpopular. A good journalist should just be and if you get into journalism hoping you’re popular, then don’t get into journalism. Go become a sitcom actor. I always said on Meet the Press, I need to make everybody uncomfortable for five minutes. That some point of view of theirs is being challenged, sometimes not by me, but it doesn’t matter. Everybody’s ideology should be challenged for at least five minutes and you should be a little irritated.

Bergelin: There’s also a lot of talk about misinformation and it’s something that our professors prepare us for. You’ve brought a lot of data analysis into your time at Meet the Press.

Todd: I’m a big fan of data because data is hard to misinform. Now you can screw up data. You can certainly cherry pick and create some false narratives, but it’s harder. Data is harder to push back on.

Bergelin: Do you think more news organizations should be prioritizing data so they are standing firm against misinformation?

Todd: I sort of view this misinformation challenge as multi-front. There’s no doubt the more data driven reporting is, I think the easier it is to get people to accept it, although that didn’t turn out to be the case for COVID. In fairness to COVID and the American public, and frankly, the global public, we didn’t handle the 1917 pandemic very well as a society.

I go back and I just think we’ve got to flood social media with better information. We can try to regulate our way out of this but I think that’s caused more problems. I think algorithms, we do not know how to regulate it, and yet, algorithms have probably done more damage to society than any singular thing that we’ve had. We’ve also got to flood the zone with more local news. We don’t need 50 new local news outlets, we need 3,000 new local news outlets.

Walker: What’s your biggest piece of advice for future journalists?

Todd: Don’t view local as small. Unfortunately, I think too many people view local as a stepping stone, not a destination. I think those [being a public servant and educator] are the two things that journalists forget they are but actually that’s what you are. You’re always more effective locally than you are nationally even though it seems like all the action is national when all the impact is local. Whatever I can do to demystify, and I say this, I’m a flawed spokesperson for this because I’ve gotten my platform nationally, but we’ve got to rehabilitate and revitalize local. It can’t be seen as a stepping stone.