This week, Chuck Todd became the new moderator for NBC’s Sunday show Meet the Press, replacing David Gregory who had been the moderator since Tim Russert’s death in 2008. Under Gregory the ratings for the show slipped and Meet the Press, which had long been the number one Sunday news show, dropped into third place behind CBS’s “Face the Nation” and ABC’s “This Week.”
Regardless of whether replacing David Gregory will improve the ratings for Meet the Press, the switch started a national discussion about the role of Sunday news shows in the modern media market. It is clear that the shows’ cultural relevance has not entirely dissipated, though it is much smaller than it used to be. Many politicians still come on Meet the Press and similar shows to make announcements and Sunday, during his first show as moderator, Chuck Todd had Barack Obama on as a guest for an extended interview that is worth watching.
However, what continues to be a problem for shows like Meet the Press is that, although they still occasionally drive the news with a good interview or a new policy proposal, they are not the primary forum in which new politically important information is created. We now live in a world where a mistaken tweet (Anthony Weiner) or a secret recording (think Mitt Romney and the forty seven percent comment) is far more impactful on the news cycle than a politician going through prepared talking points on a Sunday news show. Additionally, the attempt to create news through tough interviewing is harder now that much more of what politicians say is recorded and heavily scrutinized. Even though Chuck Todd will likely do a better job David Gregory did in causing guests to leave their planned remarks during interviews, the type of journalism that Meet the Press engages in simply does not drive the news in the way that it previously did. For the foreseeable future these shows will continue to exist as a medium for politicians to present new ideas and announce candidacies. However, Sunday shows will likely face competition from the internet for those types of announcements as the number of people who consume their news on the internet continues to grow and the number of people who receive their news from television continues to shrink.