“We are supposed to be in the business of calling out the spin, not creating it…If we want the public to trust us in the news business, how can the entities themselves lie or spin their own news?”

—Lawyer, TV pundit and news host (“Nightline”) Dan Abrams, condemning NBC’s story that Chuck Todd was leaving “Meet the Press” to spend more time with his family.

Oh, bingo, Dan! And the answer to Abrams’ rhetorical question is: Given how much, often and routinely they lie, news organizations shouldn’t expect the public to trust them, yet they do, because they have no respect for the public’s intelligence and no regard for the duty of journalists in a democracy to keep citizens informed.

When I read that Chuck Todd was leaving “Meet the Press,” my immediate reactions were 1) “Good!” 2) “Finally!” 3) “Better late than never,” and 4) “Of course he was fired.” Under Todd’s partisan and pedestrian leadership, what had once been the shining star of Sunday morning talking head shows had sunk into embarrassing hackery: Tim Russert must have been behaving like Olga Korbut in his grave. But Todd always slammed Trump and Bush, fawned over Obama and generally did his job of being a Democratic party propagandist; that was apparently good enough for his bosses even while ratings sank and the show’s reputation melted. His imminent demise had been predicted, however, and he is being replaced with Kristen Welker, a female talking head of color: after all, why suffer low ratings with a mediocre pasty white guy when at least the network can get diversity/equity/inclusion brownie points even if the show doesn’t rebound? (And Welker almost has to be an improvement.)

Clearly the staff memo from NBC News’ president of editorial, Rebecca Blumenstein, and NBC News’ senior vice president of politics, Carrie Budoff Brown extolling Todd was too much for Abrams to take quietly, concluding that it was obvious that NBC’s official story was “almost certainly a lie.”

…[R]atings were down for the show. Among the three broadcast Sunday shows, it’s gone from number one in the key demo and second in total viewers to last in total viewers and second in the demo. They had already canceled Todd’s daily show on MSNBC, and NBC was probably under pressure to replace a white male host of a show that was both suffering in the ratings and which was blasted by many on social media…[Todd’s] going to stay at NBC and just choose to relinquish his highest profile role with the 2024 election around the corner?

Abrams homing in on news organization hypocrisy was necessary and brave. It might even prompt some reform. His point that news organizations need to be transparent and not behave like other corporations when it comes to their own conduct and business is spot-on ethically. We’ll see if they get the message, and understand how important it is.

The first test will be how CNN explains its CEO Chris Licht being dropped, brought down by the network’s own “Deep State” of progressives who were furious that he was trying to see sort-of objective journalism practiced.