Former NBC anchor Chuck Todd’s recent interview on Newsmax is a perfect, self-contained exhibit of why public trust in the media has hit rock bottom. For years, figures like Todd have shaped a narrative, only to see it crumble under the weight of its own bias and error. Now, when confronted with the wreckage of their own credibility, their response is not introspection, but an astounding evasion of responsibility that blames everyone but themselves.
No surprise here, but this time they’re digging in deeper because the topic is about the fake news media.
Todd was asked to explain the “cratering trust” in his profession. Did he point to the years of slanted coverage, the dismissal of legitimate stories, or the relentless pursuit of political narratives over truth? Of course not. Instead, he offered a masterclass in deflection.
First, he argued that the media is merely a passive vessel. “I always say I’m as good as the sources I have, not necessarily the sources I want,” Todd claimed. This is the “just following orders” defense for journalism. He positioned reporters as helpless victims of unreliable officialdom, claiming, “We may be reporting what the ‘experts’ tell us… But if the public doesn’t trust those experts, and then we in the media are quoting those experts, they don’t trust us”.
This is a breathtaking abdication of the journalist’s core duty. A real journalist’s job isn’t to be a stenographer for government officials or university professors deemed “experts” by the liberal establishment. It is to question, verify, and challenge those sources. For decades, the mainstream media did not challenge their preferred sources; they amplified them uncritically while ignoring or mocking sources from the other side of the political aisle. They created the very class of untouchable “experts” the public now rejects, and they are now shocked to find they are guilty by association.
Having blamed the experts, Todd then pointed a finger at the modern world itself. “I put the blame on big tech and algorithms that sort of, I think, make it too easy for too many people to live in a bubble, a filter bubble,” he stated.
This argument is as ironic as it is false. The primary “filter bubble” for the last half-century was the one constructed by the three broadcast networks and a handful of major newspapers and magazines. They decided what was news and what wasn’t. They created a unified narrative from which dissent was excluded. The rise of alternative media and technology platforms didn’t create division; it exposed the monopoly the legacy media held and finally gave a voice to the millions of Americans they had spent decades ignoring and misrepresenting. The algorithms Chuck Todd hates simply show people what they are interested in; his industry spent decades telling people what they should be interested in, and punishing them with bad-faith labels if they disagreed.
Chuck Todd blames Americans’ cratering trust in the media on “lack of reliable political leadership” and “big tech algorithms."
It could never be the relentless stream of lies and hoaxes perpetrated on Americans by people *like Chuck.*
Truly amazing stuff. pic.twitter.com/ivAqCQigPG
— Western Lensman (@WesternLensman) December 21, 2025
Perhaps the most revealing moment was Todd’s admission that “the left doesn’t trust the media now, and the right doesn’t trust the media”. He presents this as a new, puzzling phenomenon. In reality, it is the inevitable end result. The right lost trust after years of documented bias, from the Russia collusion hoax to the suppression of the Hunter Biden laptop story. The left is now losing trust because the same media apparatus, having failed to stop Donald Trump’s return to the White House, is beginning to criticize a Democratic Party it finds insufficiently militant. They are turning on their own, and liberal viewers are finally seeing the gears of the machine at work.
The sheer denial is staggering. At no point did Todd suggest that trust fell because his colleagues routinely got big stories catastrophically wrong. It wasn’t because they presented opinion as fact. It wasn’t because they abandoned any pretense of fairness in pursuit of a political outcome. No, according to the media’s own logic, their failures are always someone else’s fault: bad sources, nefarious algorithms, or a lack of “reliable political leadership”.
This last point is the most politically charged. By hinting at a “lack of reliable political leadership”, Todd telegraphs the media’s foundational grievance: the election and re-election of Donald Trump. Trump represents the ultimate rejection of their authority. He bypasses their gatekeeping, speaks directly to the public, and correctly identifies them as political opponents rather than neutral observers. Their inability to control him or the narrative around him is the root of their existential crisis.
The contrast with the media’s attitude toward President Trump’s actual accomplishments could not be starker. Even Chuck Todd was forced to concede points, noting that Trump’s handling of the southern border crisis is seen by the public as a major success and that he has made progress in the Middle East. These are tangible results from an “America First” agenda that the media spent years predicting would lead to disaster. Every fulfilled promise, from border security to energy independence to standing up to foreign adversaries, is a direct repudiation of the media’s preferred narrative and a reason for their desperate, declining credibility.