Joe Concha Rips Chuck Todd: ‘Please Stop Lecturing Us How You’re a Journalist’ When You Are a Cheerleader ‘for the Democratic Party’

Varney: “NBC’s Chuck Todd blasted his own network for hiring former RNC Chair Ronna McDaniel. Roll it.”
[Clip starts]
Todd: “Let me deal with the elephant in the room.”
WELKER: “Yeah.”
Todd: “I think our bosses owe you an apology for putting you in this situation, because I don’t know what to believe. She is now a paid contributor by NBC News. And I have no idea whether any answer she gave to you was because she didn’t want to mess up her contract. She wants us to believe that she was speaking for the RNC when the RNC was paying for it. So she has — she has credibility issues. (...) Is she speaking for herself or is she speaking on behalf of who’s paying her? (...) There’s a reason why there’s a lot of journalists at NBC News uncomfortable with this, because many of our professional dealings with the RNC over the last six years have been met with gaslighting, have been met with character assassination.”
[Clip ends]
Varney: “Joe Concha is here with me. All right, Joe, what happened to getting both sides of the argument?”
CONCHA: “Oh, in Chuck Todd’s world, remember he’s a journalist, Stu — no actually, he’s an activist. What am I saying? And I’ll get to that in a moment. If I’m the president of NBC News, the minute Chuck Todd stepped off that set of his former show, ‘Meet the Press’ yesterday, I would have told him to take a mandatory two week vacation at a minimum. And during that vacation, I would consider firing him. The egos on these people are impossible to quantify. So apparently before any contributor gets hired at a network now management has to consult with the increasingly irrelevant Chuck Todd or Kristen Welker or Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski to get their approval? This is 31 flavors of insanity. Because at last check, no one at NBC News had any issue with Jen Psaki negotiating her contract with the network while simultaneously serving as White House press secretary. That was fine, apparently. And by the way, what crime was committed here exactly to your point? Because NBC harder Republican who actually isn’t in the Never Trump club, that’s a bad thing? MSNBC is now saying that they will never put her —“
Varney: “Right.”
CONCHA: “— on their air, at least on ‘Morning Joe.’ Because, God forbid, you want to hear anything resembling a contrarian view on a network where the audience is basically reduced to friends and relatives at this point. And it’s so ironic that this very networks, Stu that screams about saving democracy and the importance of free speech is basically the [indecipherable] network at this point, as far as differing views. To your point, let’s get both sides. Maybe that can be refreshing over an echo chamber. I don’t know just spitballing here.”
Varney: “You think he should be fired, really? That’d be a big deal at NBC.”
CONCHA: “Yeah. I think so. Because — well, Stu, look, Chuck Todd and his wife hosted a private Hillary Clinton fundraiser at their home in Georgetown before the 2016 election. So please stop lecturing us how you’re a journalist when you’re really just a cheerleader for the Democratic Party. Oh, he was also a democratic staffer, Chuck Todd, by the way. So stop lecturing. Your boss is on the air. If you have a problem with his hiring, you pick up a phone, or you walk into an office, a corner office over at 30 Rock and you say, ‘I have a problem with this. And this is why.’ You don’t publicly go out there and embarrass them. I’m sorry, if I were on that network, he’s gone. That’s it.”