Meet the Press Breaks Its Silence on Bernie Sanders

Meet the Press host Chuck Todd can’t seem to get enough of the 2016 presidential race—“I’m obsessed with elections,” he declared on the show’s May 3 episode. Yet the one major candidate who had announced he was running that week–Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders, an independent who declared on April 30 he was running for the Democratic nomination–was strikingly ignored on that same broadcast.

Sen. Bernie Sanders announced his candidacy for the Democratic presidential nomination last week–but Meet the Press’s Chuck Todd, who’s “obsessed with elections,” didn’t seem to notice. (cc photo: Paul Morigi/Brookings)

It’s not that the show didn’t have time to talk about the 2016 race. One of the program’s guests was Martin O’Malley, brought on to talk about the Baltimore protests as a former mayor of Baltimore and former Maryland governor, but also as someone “weighing a bid for the Democratic presidential nomination.” Todd closed his interview by saying: “We’ll see you, you’ll probably announce in Baltimore.” But we didn’t see anything about the candidate who actually announced that week in Washington, DC.

Afterwards, Todd had a brief discussion of an NBC/Wall Street Journal poll of voter priorities: “For Democratic primary voters, the number one issue is job creation and economic growth followed by health care and climate change”—issues that Sanders has put at the center of his campaign, though Todd made no reference to his candidacy.

Todd introduced the final panel discussion segment of the show by declaring that “we are going to have another big week of presidential announcements coming up”—listing Republicans Carly Fiorina, Ben Carson and Mike Huckabee. Sanders’ announcement had not been previewed on Meet the Press; in fact, Sanders hasn’t been mentioned on the show since September 14, 2014, when he made his only guest appearance on the show. By comparison, Hillary Clinton was mentioned in 16 of the first 17 episodes of the show in 2015.

All in all, the May 3 show mentioned 12 people who are running for president–none of them the one person whose candidacy had just been announced.

It’s worth noting that Meet the Press did not ignore Sanders because he’s so much more obscure than the other candidates. Not that polls taken more than nine months before the first vote will be cast have much validity, but in four national opinion polls taken in the month before he announced his candidacy, Sanders averaged 6 percent of the vote–as opposed to O’Malley, who averaged 2 percent. In the Republican race, Todd previewed the announcement of Fiorina, who’s averaging 1 percent in polls.

Todd responded to complaints about his failure to mention Sanders’ announcement with a standard letter (Activism Update, 5/4/15) that noted (as did FAIR’s Action Alert) that Sanders had appeared on Meet the Press last year. (Todd got the month wrong.) He touted mentions of Sanders on Meet the Press’s web-only content, and concluded:

Some media site decided to come up with some arbitrary way to judge the show and cherry-picked facts to create a false narrative. Careful of click-bait false impressions.

The Washington Post’s Ruth Marcus and Meet the Press’s Chuck Todd discussing Bernie Sanders’ presidential candidacy–under the banner of “Obama vs. Warren.”

Todd may think seeing whether or not someone has been mentioned on Meet the Press is “some arbitrary way to judge the show,” but it seems to us to be a fairly straightforward way to gauge who the show thinks is an important part of the political discussion and who is not. (See chart.)

As it happened, on the very next episode of Meet the Press (5/10/15) after FAIR’s Action Alert, Todd brought up “Bernie Sanders, who, by the way, you’ve seen is suddenly, with Elizabeth Warren out…topping the, sort of, the second-place vote.” Todd noted Sanders’ strong opposition to the Trans-Pacific Partnership trade pact as a possible factor in the 2016 election. Here’s hoping Meet the Press will continue to treat Sanders’ positions as a regular part of the political conversation.

Candidate Mentions on Meet the Press

January 3–May 3, 2015
(17 Episodes)

Hillary Clinton 16
Jeb Bush 13
Scott Walker 12
Chris Christie 11
Rand Paul 10
Mike Huckabee 10
Ted Cruz 8
Elizabeth Warren 7
Marco Rubio 6
Rick Santorum 6
Bobby Jindal 5
John Kasich 4
Ben Carson 4
Rick Perry 4
Joe Biden 4
Martin O’Malley 3
Carly Fiorina 3
Jim Webb 2
Sarah Palin 2
John Bolton 2
Mike Pence 2
Jim Gilmore 1
George Pataki 1
Peter King 1
Bernie Sanders 0

Meet the Press‘s Chuck Todd can be reached at Chuck.Todd@NBCUni.com, or via Twitter @ChuckTodd. Please remember that respectful communication is the most effective.