A Knight Foundation Gallup poll released last fall revealed trust in the media was down…again. Nearly 70 percent of Americans don’t trust those who deliver the news. And an earlier poll found that only Congress inspires less confidence than TV news, but it’s within three percentage points.

So, Congress has some competition, and NBC seems inclined to overtake it as the basement dweller of American no confidence.

Case in point, NBC’s Meet the Press host Chuck Todd in his final 2018 episode on climate change. Todd bragged about not allowing any voices who might disagree with Todd and global warming activists. With noteworthy righteousness Todd stared into the camera and stated:

Just as important as what we are going to do this hour is what we're not going to do. 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. We're not going to give time to climate deniers. The science is settled, even if political opinion is not.

With that statement, Todd refused to include thoughtful climate scientists who disagree with hair-on-fire alarmists that catastrophe is just around the corner unless we immediately raise taxes, curtail energy usage, and move away from hydrocarbon-based electricity production in favor of blanketing our country with industrial wind farms, utility scale solar, thousands of miles and transmission lines and massive banks of giant batteries.

This is the same NBC News Meet the Press that just last year gave significant air time to then congressional candidate Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (now elected), a self-described socialist from New York City who recently stated the “world is gonna end in 12 years if we don’t address climate change” fame.

Which prompted this criticism from the New York Post:

Yes, her full remarks made it clear she only meant that the world would begin to end in 12 years if we don’t act. But she was still wildly wrong.

Yet AOC was just saying what many people believe. Shallow, apocalyptic reporting on global warming has made us all panicky, more likely to embrace poor climate policies and less likely to think about the price tag.

Without multiple viewpoints, “shallow, apocalyptic” is exactly the kind of conversation that Todd promoted on what used to be the gold standard of journalism, Meet the Press.

Fortunately, folks over at the Competitive Enterprise Institute (CEI) are holding Todd accountable for his lapse in journalistic judgment. They’ve initiated a campaign to call out Todd for his attempt to stifle debate. CEI has run print ads in both the Washington Post and the Wall Street Journal. True to their first amendment stifling form, NBC refused the TV ad, but you can watch it here .

Todd may want debate to die in his darkness, but as CEI points out that’s not how the real world works:

Contrary to Chuck Todd and the alarmists, there is a real debate among scientists, if not television journalists, about the extent of warming and its effects. Although the computer models predict rapid warming, the actual temperature data show only a modest rate of warming.

Real-world data demonstrate that the policies supported by climate alarmists are unwarranted. Huge tax hikes and energy rationing will cripple our economy, especially hurting those who can least afford it.

Millions of Americans agree that global warming is not a crisis that requires turning the economy and our lives upside down — but you’d never know that from watching Chuck Todd and Meet the Press

A few days ago, Todd doubled down in defense of his lack of debate when he “described climate change as an ‘insurance policy’ to skeptics, arguing ‘why would you not want it?’”

I’ll answer that. Because the supposed cure – expensive and unreliable energy, higher taxes, higher cost of goods, and little positive environmental impact – is ten times worse than the alleged disease.

Ignoring the debate doesn’t make it go away, and it certainly doesn’t advance any understanding of differing viewpoints in a deeply divided country. The only thing it does do is probably make Todd more popular in the Manhattan cocktail party circuit and less popular among average Americans who already have little confidence in TV news.