What happened to Chuck Todd?

Its hard to believe how inane Chuck Todd has become, considering how much I admired his reporting (though I guess the cool kids call it “reportage” now)  just two years ago.

See here. (if you don’t already know, John Cole’s Balloon Juice is a great blog, and you should read it often.)

This is going to sound like a defense of bad journalistic behavior when it is not. But you really can’t overestimate the tendency one has to trust the response one has to one’s own surroundings. It is easy for me to imagine that, given the social circles that these guys frequent, the country would indeed appear to be center-right. Hell, if I was a complete cultural newbie having been randomly dropped into Augusta, GA (my current hometown, for better or worse), I could only assume that the country is hard-right. And I’ll be honest with you: even though I’m not a total cultural idiot and highly value John Cole’s blog and other more left-leaning sites, for the most part it’s not very real to me. Sure, you people all exist, and I’m grateful (sometimes this is all the keeps me from going crazy considering where I live), but the evidence of my eyes proclaims more than anything else that you exist in a vacuum. It’s possibly some counter-intuitive side-effect of evolution, or it’s possibly just me, but sometimes it’s hard for me to believe that the country is anything but center-right given the realities of my daily life.

I’m not defending Howard Kurtz or Chuck Todd, may they burn in a thousand imaginary hells. I guess what I am saying is that if we want media types to at least seem less skewed, many tough-slog changes are going to have to happen to the culture first. And let’s face it, it’s far, far, far easier to be conservative than it is to be liberal, in the same way that it’s easier to blow up a house than it is to build it…

It occurs to me that this may sound like a pessimistic comment when it really isn’t. I think things have been leaning our way for some time now, even without the disaster of the Bush years, but I do think that these things tend to happen slowly, sometimes so slowly that one would be forgiven for wondering if things will ever change at all.