Chuck Todd apologizes for gun violence video that ran day of Charleston services
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Version 0 of 1. NBC journalist Chuck Todd has apologized for a video about gun violence, featuring exclusively black men, that aired on the same day that residents of Charleston, South Carolina, held memorial services for the black victims of a white shooter who has espoused racist beliefs. The host of NBC’s Meet the Press responded to the backlash against the video on Monday, tweeting to a critic who denounced him for “the privilege of not having to be aware of your own color”. “We’ve heard you. We clearly got it wrong and we are sorry,” Todd replied. Only a day earlier Todd had defended the decision to air the video. “The last thing we wanted was to cloud the discussion of the topic,” Todd wrote on NBC’s website. Todd said he and the show’s staff discussed delaying the video after the shooting on Wednesday, and had a conversation about “race and perception – not the conversation we wanted the segment to invoke”. He said the staff decided to run the video “because we wanted to show multiple sides of what gun violence does in this country”. “We thought the issue of gun violence in our culture and society was an important conversation to continue – too important to put off for another week,” Todd wrote. “The consequences of gun violence should not be hidden.” The segment aired Sunday as South Carolinians attended the first weekly services at Emanuel AME Church since nine black people were killed at a Bible study session there last Wednesday night. “The circumstances you are about to see are very different from the racist violence in Charleston,” Todd said before the segment. “In this case the inmates are African American that you’re going to hear from, but their lessons remain important.” He then asked panelists to treat it as a “colorblind issue”. The video shows inmates at New York’s Sing Sing prison speaking tearfully about their regrets for having killed people with guns, and of their disillusionment with holding onto guns as a source of security and power. Eugene Robinson, a columnist for the Washington Post and panelist on the show, noted the homogeneity on air. “It wasn’t a terribly diverse set of people who were talking,” he said. “I mean right now we’re talking about a horrific crime committed by a white man, we’re talking about the escape, the search for two escaped murderers who are white men,” Robinson continued, in reference to two killers on the lam in New York. “We should point out that this is not just an African American problem.” “No, no and it wasn’t intended to be that way,” Todd responded. Afterward, Todd wrote that the political talk show “should make all viewers uncomfortable at some point or we are not doing our job. I hope folks view the gun video as a part of the conversation we should all be having and not the totality of it.” Todd said that all of the men who appeared in the video had volunteered to take part. Problems of institutional racism, underlying biases in communities and stark gaps along racial lines – especially in context of police violence and the justice system – have sparked protests, riots and emotional debates in the year since a white police officer, Darren Wilson, shot dead a black teenager, Michael Brown, in Ferguson, Missouri, last year. A 2013 Pew study found that according to 2010 numbers, all black men were six times as likely as all white men to be incarcerated in jail at any level, and that the income gaps between white and black households had increased in recent decades. In 2014, a study by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention found that between 2000 and 2010, African Americans were twice as likely to die from a gunshot wound as were white Americans. Research performed by the Guardian on police killings, for which no official records are kept, found that compared with white Americans, black Americans are more than twice as likely to be unarmed when killed during encounters with police. |