12 Worst Fails Of Media Hack And Toilet Paper Bandit Chuck Todd

Announcing his abrupt departure from NBC News on Friday, former “Meet the Press” host Chuck Todd admitted the “media has a lot of work to do to win back the trust” of its audience. In a great display of self-awareness and humility, Todd helped the corporate media establishment make a great stride toward winning back that trust by removing himself from it.

Like many has-beens who have been before him, Todd will take some time to focus on his podcast. (To his credit, the Chuck Toddcast is not titled The Contrarian and does not employ Jennifer Rubin.) Maybe he’ll finally get to achieve his true calling of being a referee. We really hope his future plans for full-time employment don’t involve starting an OnlyFans full of awkward crotch photos, or a career in seatbelt marketing.

Maybe he plans to spend his time indulging in his self-admitted habit of going into other people’s houses and changing the direction their toilet paper hangs to “under.” Whatever the future holds for Todd, here are 11 more times (besides the crotch photo incident) that maybe should have been a hint to retire a lot sooner.

Believing Rights Come From God Is ‘Fundamentalist’

Back in 2017 when Roy Moore was running for an Alabama Senate seat, the controversial candidate expressed a very uncontroversial belief that “Our rights don’t come from government, they don’t come from the Bill of Rights, they come from Almighty God.”

That was a bridge too far for Todd, who decided such “fundamentalist views” meant Moore must not “believe in the Constitution as it’s written.”

Apparently Todd does not believe in the Declaration of Independence as it’s written, or he would have remembered that all men are “endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights,” which “Governments are instituted among Men” in order to secure.

‘Do You Know [Boys and Girls Are Different] As a Scientist?’

During an interview with Vivek Ramaswamy during the Republican presidential primary in 2023, Todd couldn’t help pushing back on Ramaswamy’s suggestion that doctors should not carve up the body parts of children who exhibit symptoms of gender dysphoria.

“How do you know — are you confident that you know that gender is as binary as you’re describing it? Are you confident that it isn’t a spectrum?” Todd asked.

Evidently, Todd is a member of D-list Broadway actress Ketanji Brown Jackson’s school of thought when it comes to biology, because he pressed further: “Do you know this as a scientist?”

Obviously, it doesn’t take a scientist to understand that boys and girls are different. (It also doesn’t take a scientist to understand how babies are made, though it apparently does take someone smarter than Todd’s fellow propagandist Philip Bump. Hopefully Todd has more knowledgeable colleagues than Bump to explain the birds and the bees to him. Or he can just watch The Kindergarten Cop.)

Deceptive Editing and Lying About Bill Barr

Before Kamala Harris and “60 Minutes” made it cool, Chuck Todd and “Meet the Press” were splicing videos deceptively.

In 2020, then-Attorney General Bill Barr was asked by CBS how he thought the history books would judge his decision to drop charges against Gen. Michael Flynn. Barr noted with a chuckle that “history is written by the winners, so it largely depends who’s winning the history,” before adding that “a fair history would say that it was a good decision because it upheld the rule of law … and it undid what was an injustice.”

Deceptively taking Barr’s words out of context, Todd showed just the first half — the snarky opener that preceded Barr’s actual answer — to his viewers, asking Peggy Noonan if she was as “struck by the cynicism” of the answer as he was.

“He didn’t make the case that he was upholding the rule of law,” Todd added, despite the fact that Barr argued exactly that in his next sentence.

After being mocked for the deception, Todd claimed NBC “did not edit that out” but “include[d] it because we only saw the shorter of two clips CBS did air.” His admission that NBC never thought to check the full transcript or interview was hardly less embarrassing.

Biden Corruption Isn’t Worth Investigating Because It’s ‘Not a Crime to Make Money off of Your Last Name’

Less than two years before Joe Biden issued a 10-year blanket pardon to his son, along with several members of his family, Chuck Todd was arguing that an investigation into Biden family corruption really wasn’t all that important.

“Senator, do you have a crime that you think Hunter Biden committed?” he asked Sen. Ron Johnson. “Because I’ve yet to see anybody explain. It is not a crime to make money off of your last name.”

That aged well!

Apologizing to a Colleague for Having to Talk to a Republican

When Todd’s employer made the unconscionable decision to hire a Republican contributor in the form of former RNC Chairwoman Ronna McDaniel, the backlash from McDaniel’s new colleagues was so hysterical, NBC dropped her in less than a week.

During that time, McDaniel sat for a 20-minute interview on “Meet the Press” with Kristen Welker. Afterward, Todd told Welker he thought “our bosses owe you an apology for putting you in this situation.”

Todd has yet to apologize to his listeners for putting them in the unfortunate situation of watching NBC.

Have We Tried Fixing DOJ by Doing Less Oversight?

There have been plenty of corruption problems at the Department of Justice — a trend Chuck Todd noticed not when the FBI helped create the Trump-Russia collusion hoax and spied on the Trump campaign based on fraudulent intelligence, nor when the Biden DOJ tried to throw candidate Trump in prison. No, Todd became concerned about politicization at the DOJ when the department, helmed by Barr, recommended a shorter prison sentence than seven to nine years for Roger Stone for lying to Congress.

“Are we at the point where we cannot trust a political appointee to be in charge of Justice?” Todd asked. Because obviously, the solution to a bloated bureaucracy with a history of weaponizing its police powers to target political opponents is to make it impossible for the American people to vote those bureaucrats out.

Americans Lost Trust in Media Because *Checks Notes* Fox News Told Them To

Chuck Todd recognized back in 2018 that trust in media was plummeting. But instead of taking responsibility for losing Americans’ trust by participating in hoaxes like Russiagate, Todd decided it was all Fox News’ fault, and said so in an op-ed in The Atlantic. The problem wasn’t with the left-wing media establishment he represented — it was that everyone, led by Fox News and Donald Trump, was meanly attacking journalists!

His solution, rather than engage in some serious industry-wide self-reflection, was for the media to double down and “start fighting back” against their critics. The press, Todd argued, needed to be “more aggressive.” I wonder how he thinks that worked out for them.

Doubling Down on Russiagate After Steele Dossier Was Found to Be Fake

When DOJ Inspector General Michael Horowitz concluded in 2019 that the Steele dossier — which had been funded by the Hillary Clinton campaign and shopped to the FBI to smear Trump — wasn’t reliable, it was an embarrassment for the media, who had spread the Russia collusion hoax for years. Most of them tried to salvage the Trump-Russia story by insisting that, even if the Steele dossier was fraudulent, the investigation based on it was still totally legit.

Todd did that too, but first took a slightly more unconventional approach: He hosted the co-founders of the opposition research firm that helped the Clinton campaign commission the dossier on his show to defend the dossier and its author, Christopher Steele. They did so with such profound statements as “you can’t actually catch rabbits without going down some rabbit holes,” before expressing “full confidence” in Steele’s ability to, apparently, go down rabbit holes really well.

It was a weird choice, though perhaps not as weird as Todd’s decision to write a piece six months later titled “No hoax: Why the Russia investigation remains one of Trump’s biggest scandals.”

Refusal to Air Trump’s Allegations Against Hunter Biden Because It Wouldn’t Be Nice

A full year before the Big Tech-corporate media industrial complex instituted a blackout on the Hunter Biden laptop story in the lead-up to the 2020 election, Chuck Todd was test-driving the approach. Todd refused to air comments Trump made about the Biden family business, despite their extreme relevance to the senior Biden’s presidential campaign.

“We are going further than we’ve ever gone before to say, we aren’t going to play the sound. We aren’t going to repeat the president’s vicious attacks on Hunter Biden. The president of the United States stood in front of a crowd of supporters and character-assassinated” the Biden son, Todd claimed. “We can’t in good conscience amplify those attacks.”

Funny how it didn’t prick the consciences of the good people of NBC to amplify untrue attacks like, I don’t know, the claim that Trump hired Russian prostitutes to pee on a bed in Moscow?

Fake Impeachment News

While hosting “Meet the Press” in 2019, in the midst of Democrats’ crusade to impeach Trump, Todd found himself in the awkward position of having to pretend any House Republican had voted in favor of an impeachment inquiry into Trump when in fact, none had.

In a graphic purporting to show how many members of Trump’s party supported his impeachment, compared to how many Democrats supported President Bill Clinton’s impeachment, Todd’s “Meet the Press” team aired this graphic on television:

The asterisk is there because the “Republican” actually wasn’t a Republican at all, but a former Republican who had left the GOP months before NBC aired the incorrect graphic.

Todd even admitted during the broadcast, “I have one with an asterisk here. I don’t know what you do with Justin Amash. It’s not a zero. At the same time, he’s not a Republican anymore.”

Nothing Wrong With Being ‘Overly Alarmist’ About Covid-19

In April of 2020, while politicians around the country were shutting down schools, churches, businesses, and dinner parties under the iron fist of Anthony Fauci, Todd suggested it was the better choice to destroy communities in the name of “caution” because “if you’re wrong and you’ve, and you’ve been overly alarmist, well, nobody’s, nobody extra has died.”

Of course, that wasn’t true — a lot of extra people died, from overdoses and suicides driven by isolation and unemployment, and from cancer and heart attacks because they weren’t able to get check-ups and screenings. Some research indicates that Covid lockdowns caused more of these kind of “excess deaths” than lives they saved from Covid.

Elle Purnell is the elections editor at The Federalist. Her work has been featured by Fox Business, RealClearPolitics, the Tampa Bay Times, and the Independent Women’s Forum. She received her B.A. in government from Patrick Henry College with a minor in journalism. Follow her on Twitter @_ellepurnell.