Chuck Todd: “We’re Not Going to Give Time to Climate Deniers”

MSNBC’s Chuck Todd, usually a punching bag for sites like ours, did something pretty courageous by cable news standards on Sunday: In an episode dedicated to climate change, he flat-out refused to entertain the notion that it isn’t real, or that it isn’t caused by humans. As such, he didn’t waste any air time on the right-wingers who espouse that viewpoint, usually on behalf of their corporate overlords.

“We’re not going to give time to climate deniers,” Todd said. “The science is settled even if political opinion is not…We’re not going to debate climate change, the existence of it. The Earth is getting hotter and human activity is a major cause. Period.”

This should be the position of every cable TV news host, every editorial board at a major newspaper, and, really, all media outlets. But there’s a lot of big money behind the deniers, and big money makes the media world go ‘round, so it took some chutzpah for Todd to cut them out of the debate. Without that important first step, the idea of actually doing something about it becomes impossible, since the problem stays mired in the “is it real?” phase, which is just what the deniers want.

Watch the intro to Todd’s Sunday morning show here: