Former \u201cMeet the Press\u201d host Chuck Todd now calls de-platforming Donald Trump \u201cthe biggest mistake legacy media made.\u201d In a Newsmax interview, he argued that the post\u2013January 6 bans on Trump and the shunning of lawmakers who would not certify the 2020 results \u201cmade everything worse\u201d because \u201cwe have now completely different ecosystems, and that is less healthy for the system than anything else.\u201d He described what he saw inside newsrooms as an \u201cunofficial pressure campaign\u201d to avoid interviewing January 6 objectors, a choice he labels \u201ca core mistake of the intelligentsia of the left.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Todd says the fix is to put arguments back in the open and test them instead of blocking them. \u201cUltimately, all you have is your own personal credibility,\u201d he said. \u201cYou stick with your facts. I\u2019m not here to tell you to drink the water; my job is to lead you to the stream.\u201d He added that if journalists can sit with adversaries abroad, they can interview domestic figures they dislike: \u201cIf I\u2019m willing to sit down with Vladimir Putin or the president of Iran, you\u2019re telling me you can\u2019t interview somebody who voted not to certify on January 6th?\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Supporters of the bans said they were necessary after January 6 to reduce immediate harms. The aim was to stop false claims from spreading, lower the risk of incitement, and blunt Trump\u2019s reach by removing him from his most powerful distribution channels. The hope was that less visibility would mean less influence and a cooler national mood.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Writers who studied the fallout warned early that the ban did not change the deeper political currents. Casey Newton concluded that nearly a year later \u201chis power has arguably only increased.\u201d He noted that Trump still drove the news with \u201ctweet-like press releases,\u201d frequent TV appearances, rallies, and a new media venture, while also promoting a nationwide push to change election rules. Newton wrote that removing Trump \u201calmost certainly prevented real harms,\u201d but \u201cdid little to improve the underlying political situation,\u201d which he said was \u201cgetting worse all the time.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Vox\u2019s Zack Beauchamp framed it as a failure of gatekeeping. He argued that the 2024 cycle \u201cconclusively proven\u201d what should have been clear since 2016: \u201cAmerica\u2019s gatekeepers have failed.\u201d Gatekeeping relies on elites declaring topics or people out of bounds and expecting the rest of society to follow. In his words, \u201cTrump\u2019s wins are proof that gatekeeping doesn\u2019t really work anymore.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Todd links the bans to a larger credibility slide. He says legacy outlets replaced dialog with exclusion. \u201cYou may not want to platform these folks, but half the country did,\u201d he said. \u201cYou\u2019re supposed to be covering what that is.\u201d He also faults big media owners for caving to political pressure instead of defending free expression. In his longer reflections, he called recent government pressure on broadcasters \u201csadness,\u201d adding, \u201cThe law is on the side of the media companies, and they just don\u2019t want to use it.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Todd\u2019s core claim is that exiling Trump did not shrink his coalition. It hardened it somewhere else. In his words, \u201cDe-platforming Donald Trump from Twitter and Facebook was a mistake. There\u2019s an entire new ecosystem that exists that\u2019s created their own reality. And this is now the damage that we\u2019re all facing.\u201d Newton describes that world as thriving through alternative channels that do not depend on a single platform.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Trump\u2019s detractors have argued in the past the bans were justified by his behavior and by safety concerns. They supported a collective move to shun people who would not certify the election. Todd now says that collective shunning traded journalism\u2019s core tools for a tactic that backfired. Instead of tough, on-air questioning, the public saw a blacklist mentality. He points out that many in media also resisted pressing Democrats on sensitive issues such as President Biden\u2019s age even though, as he put it, \u201cinternal polling consistently showed public concern.\u201d To audiences, that felt like taking a side.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Todd says mockery replaced argument. He notes that \u201cuninformed media critics\u201d preferred jokes about his interviews to engaging with the journalistic case for long, probing follow-ups. He singled out the late-night and satire culture that \u201cpoked fun\u201d at him for being too light, while he insists, \u201cI\u2019ve always said the most important questions are the follow-ups.\u201d That tone, he argues, sent a message that some people should not be heard at all, which undermines free speech norms and pushes millions of voters out of the conversation.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Both Todd and outside observers describe a country drifting further apart. Newton highlights that after the bans, the political project around Trump continued and in some ways deepened. Beauchamp notes that attempts to police speech from above did not move public behavior. Survey work described in reporting that Newton cites found that \u201c21 million Americans could plausibly be described as \u2018committed insurrectionists,\u2019\u201d illustrating that the challenge is broader than one account on one site.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Todd\u2019s prescription is to do the work in public. \u201cSome of us are swimming in the middle of this stream,\u201d he said, rejecting the idea that every journalist must choose a side. He argues for interviewing consequential actors, pressing them with facts, and letting audiences watch the claims get tested. He sees engagement as the path back to trust: rebuild local reporting, show your methods, and stop acting like gatekeepers for half the country.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
NP Editor: <\/strong> Chuck Todd is a hypocrite of the highest order, pretending that he is above it all and describing the mistakes of his brethren. In reality he was as anxious to stifle speech from Trump as anyone – just another liberal asshole making excuses for his own behavior.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Former \u201cMeet the Press\u201d host Chuck Todd now calls de-platforming Donald Trump \u201cthe biggest mistake legacy media made.\u201d In a Newsmax interview, he argued that the post\u2013January 6 bans on Trump and the shunning of lawmakers who would not certify the 2020 results \u201cmade everything worse\u201d because \u201cwe have now completely different ecosystems, and that is less healthy for the system than anything else.\u201d He described what he saw inside newsrooms as an \u201cunofficial pressure campaign\u201d to avoid interviewing January […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":6646,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[18,20,21,22,28],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-6644","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-politics","category-propaganda","category-threat-to-america","category-trump","category-woke-agenda"],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/nakedpolitics.net\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/10\/chucktodd.jpg","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/nakedpolitics.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6644","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/nakedpolitics.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/nakedpolitics.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nakedpolitics.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nakedpolitics.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=6644"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/nakedpolitics.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6644\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":6645,"href":"https:\/\/nakedpolitics.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6644\/revisions\/6645"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nakedpolitics.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/6646"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/nakedpolitics.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=6644"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nakedpolitics.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=6644"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nakedpolitics.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=6644"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}