Meet The Press Chuck Todd, Shawna Thomas Should Be Fired

Meet The Press' Chuck Todd, Shawna Thomas Should Be Fired Meet The Press' anchor Chuck Todd has come under heavy fire for the airing of a segment on Sunday's Father's Day show that presented black men in prison talking about their regret of using a gun in the crimes they committed. Considering that on Wednesday night of last week a young, 21-year-old, white man with intense hate for blacks walked into Emanuel AME Church, the oldest one of its kind in the World, and killed nine people, what Chuck Todd presented was shameful and tone deaf. It sent social media into a lather, caused “Chuck Todd” to become a worldwide Twitter trend, and with most calling for NBC to fire him. While I agree with the calls, it occurred to me that Chuck Todd wasn't the only one in Meet The Press management to make that call, so I searched for who the head producer for MTP was. In the past, it was the capable Betsy Fischer Martin, who left after 11 years. Martin was replaced by John Reiss and Shawna Thomas, who was given the role of Senior Producer. While Mr. Todd has taken all of the heat for the airing of the video, Reiss and Thomas have received virtually none. That's going to change: Shawna Thomas, in particular, should be fired. While it's one thing for a white male in media like Reiss to make a decision that sends the message that the problem of white racism toward blacks which played the central role in the Charleston Shooting should not be the focus of Meet The Press, it's quite another thing when a black woman makes the same decision. People will want to know what her motivations were, and with that, I wondered about Shawna Thomas' background – who was she married to? Now, to square this, the vast majority of my girlfriends have been white, and that goes back to a childhood on the South Side of Chicago in the 60s where many black girls in Chicago made fun of me for “talking like a white person” or being “proper”. When my Mom and I moved to Oakland, Calfornia, I quickly established an interracial group of friends, was the co-founder of the Bret Harte Junior High School Star Trek Club, and many of my best male friends and my girlfriends were white. But I have never let my personal issues cloud my media in a way that told stories which were insulting to blacks. Shawna Thomas did that with Meet The Press, and at one of the worst moments in American History. There's nothing at all wrong with Shawna Thomas' decision to marry a white man (as she did this year in April in Houston) any more than it would me tying the knot with a white woman. But there are motivations for such actions in the same way that a white woman might elect to date only white men, or Asian men, or a black man selecting only black women. Those personal motivations remain such, until it's obvious they form the foundation for that person's media work. That is the case for Mr. Thomas. On Twitter, Shawna Thomas sent tweets (@ShawnaNBCNews), and issued retweets that sent the message she was fully, 100 percent behind the segment Chuck Todd presided over. Why? She called it “powerful” in one tweet, and in the process openly communicated the same tone-deafness that Todd displayed. But Shawna also sent a more sinister message that she would prefer the discussion to be turned away from the problem of white racism and white supremacy, and toward one of blacks using guns to kill each other. That just happens to be the same take that white supremacists have and write on the website Stormfront. So, in other words, Shawna would rather maintain white racism intact and join Stormfront in denouncing black gun violence. Excuse me: black male gun violence. Wow. That is why both she and Chuck Todd should be fired. There are many others in media, like John Stewart and Rachel Maddow, who are not afraid to take on the problem of white racism and white nationalism. Shawna sends the message that she would rather punish black men, and that idea, combined with her personal life decisions, sends an overall message of hostility toward black men. Come to think of it, Dylann Root expressed the same problem. Shameful. Horrible. Time for change at Meet The Press.

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