Last Updated on December 31, 2019
On Sunday’s airing of MSNBC’s Meet the Press, Chuck Todd covered a letter the the editor featured in an edition of the Lexington Herald that insulted people of faith and supporters of President Donald J. Trump.
This letter likened individuals who vote for President Trump to religious individuals who think “fairy tales” are real, referring to the story of Noah and the Ark. Noah’s Ark is a well known parable for practicing Christians, Jews, and even Muslims.
https://twitter.com/JerryDunleavy/status/1211321489821257728?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw%7Ctwcamp%5Etweetembed%7Ctwterm%5E1211321489821257728&ref_url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.newsweek.com%2Fnbcs-chuck-todd-faces-backlash-highlighting-letter-comparing-bible-story-trump-falsehoods-1479569
“No big deal, just @ChuckTodd attacking believing Jews, Christians, and Muslims (all three faiths contain the story of Noah’s Ark) because Drumpf,” Washington Examiner reporter Jerry Dunleavy tweeted.
The letter, written by David Bowles, reads:
“[Why] do good people support Trump? It’s because people have been trained from childhood to believe in fairy tales,” the letter read. “This set their minds up to accept things that make them feel good… The more fairy tales and lies he tells the better they feel… Show me a person who believes in Noah’s ark and I will show you a Trump voter.”
“It was a fascinating attempt to try to explain why some people support President Trump,” Todd said, in reference to the letter. “This gets at something that my executive producer likes to say, ‘voters want to be lied to sometimes. They don’t always love being told hard truths.'”
Also present during the Meet the Press segment was New York Times editor Dean Baquet as well as Marty Baron, editor at the Washington Post.
Baron challenges the message of the letter read by Todd.
“I’m not quite sure I buy that,” Baquet said. “Politicians historically have lied to people. I don’t want to keep flogging Mary’s terrific Afghanistan story but that was about a generation of political leaders who lied in the most egregious way, which was to say a war that was failing and leading to American deaths was actually succeeding. I’m not convinced that people want to be lied to. I think people want to be comforted and I think bad politicians sometimes say comforting things to them.”
“I think we have to be careful, I don’t want to be dismissive of people who support the president. I think they’re owed our respect and they certainly have mine,” Baron said, “but they feel that the so-called elites in Washington has not paid attention to them. That they don’t understand their lives, they don’t understand their concerns and they’re not being heard. They feel that the president is actually listening to them and addressing their concerns so they tend to believe him.”
Twitter users had mostly negative reactions to the insulting letter to the Lexington Herald, as well as the decision of Todd to discuss it favorably on MSNBC. MSNBC, which has been dropping in viewership along with many other mainstream news channels, is no stranger to the glorifying of inappropriate content so long as it directly insults President Trump.
If Chuck Todd's wondering why Trump voters don't trust the mainstream media, one reason might be they don't like supposedly impartial reporters insinuating the real reason they support the President is because they "want to be lied to" and comparing the Bible to "fairy tales" pic.twitter.com/jlkzYvE4Or
— Zach Parkinson (@AZachParkinson) December 29, 2019
“If Chuck Todd’s wondering why Trump voters don’t trust the mainstream media, one reason might be they don’t like supposedly impartial reporters insinuating the real reason they support the President is because they ‘want to be lied to’ and comparing the Bible to ‘fairy tales,'” wrote Zach Parkinson on Twitter.
The fairy tales Chuck Todd told us for years about the Steele dossier have more to do with media distrust than Noah's Ark.
— Ben Domenech (@bdomenech) December 29, 2019
