The False Pretensions of Today’s Meet the Press

I founded and taught for 20 years a course called Media Criticism to upper-level students at Towson University, and it was an elective, always full.

I love political criticism shows, and perhaps the finest is Howard Kurtz’s Media Buzz on Fox.  But that is only a partly political telecast, ostensibly focused on media, and the analyses that find their way into national discussion are the Sunday news talk shows on all the major networks.

Meet the Press (MTP) has one of the most impressive histories of the Sunday news shows on the major networks.  It has been around since 1947, initiated on radio in 1945 as American Mercury Presents: Meet the Press and, in those nearly 60 years since, it has brought to the fore major leaders for sometimes blistering but always informative question-and-answer sessions to promote public awareness of issues of the day – until a number of years ago.

The show always allowed its guests to be the focus of the show, and the moderators brought with them in their quivers of questions and follow-ups well-informed inquiries which often elicited answers, which valuably elucidated the interviewees’ positions, often fully unknown until they were interviewed.

The last one-quarter to one-third of the show was generally a good and thorough discussion of the interaction with the guests and news of the day.  Until a number of years ago.

Some of the great moderators whom I watched on MTP have included Lawrence E. Spivak (1966-1975), (Bill Monroe 1975-1984), Marvin Kalb (1985-1987), and Tim Russert (1991-2008).

They were serious, fair, disinterested,  and prepared.

The show started declining after the 2008 untimely death of Russert, and the decline was steep.

Starting with David Gregory in 2008, who simply didn’t click with his audience, there were Chuck Todd and Kristen Welker, both quite knowledgeable and even more self-satisfied.  Their panels were invariably three left-of-center media or political folks and one more or less type-B personality conservatives.  All guests were knowledgeable.

Not until Todd came aboard was a moderator demonstrably biased in favor of liberals-progressives and the Democratic Party.

But although the telling quality that has compromised MTP began with Todd, even his persistent bias was no match for the early days of his replacement Kristen Welker.

You may see her at her typical anti-conservative zenith early last year in an interview with then-Sen. Marco Rubio, wherein she wouldn’t let him answer a question and intently insisted that her evidence be accepted rather than his counterpoints regarding which party challenges the results of elections.

In the most recent show (May 18, 2025), she showed some new improvement, letting former Vice President Mike Pence answer some questions with few interruptions despite her usual skepticism of Republican points, as well as her decent demeanor with Secretary of the Treasury Scott Bessent.

However, when Conn. Sen. Chris Murphy is interviewed, she blinks not an eye when he called President Trump a “madman,” and her usual majority-far-left panel was as far left as I have seen.  And there was, as often is the case, but one easygoing conservative.

The panel discussing the week’s news, featuring Andrea Mitchell, who is smart but no longer hides her far-left bias, focused only on Trump’s alleged corruption.  It also featured PBS’s Amna Nawaz.  She was an uncareful arguer, the furthest left on the leftist panel until Ashley Etienne, Communication Director for Kamala Harris, who weighed in to the point wherein even slow-to-react nominal conservative Stephen Hayes, author at The Dispatch, objected, when Nawaz said that the Biden debacle would not disadvantage the Democrats going forward.  They are not responsible, of course, for the revelation this week of Biden’s prostate cancer, but the major uninterest in Biden’s health over the last couple of years was significant in their discussion.

Nawaz retrenches, which is part of the reason I recommend the following changes in MTP, which apply mutatis mutandis to all political talk shows:

1. A major improvement: often interview two guests at a time, allowing counterpoints by each.  Don’t have the moderator insist pre-emptively on the agenda and interpretation as he/she interviews each guest.  Follow-ups are essential, but apply them equally and then drop them even if the principal being interviewed won’t accede to the moderator’s point-of-view.

2. Apply some serious balance to the end-of-show panel: two conservatives and two liberals, all four of whom should represent some of the more articulate and center parts of their ideology.

3. Have the moderator simply be fair – Tim Russert. a liberal, was a great interviewer of all his guests.  You could watch his show and not be able to infer his politics.

Those changes could make Meet the Press and similar shows watchable and ultimately even informative and valuable as in the old days.

It could truly once again be “a place for diverse voices and challenging conversations.”

Richard E. Vatz, Ph.D

Richard E. Vatz  https://wp.towson.edu/vatz/  is a Distinguished Professor Emeritus of political rhetoric at Towson University and author of The Only Authentic of Persuasion: the Agenda-Spin Model  (Bookwrights House, 2024) and over 200 other works, essays, lectures, and op-eds.  He is the benefactor of the Richard E. Vatz Best Debater Award at Towson.  The Van Bokkelen Auditorium at Towson University has been named after him.