Meet The Press revamp met with ridicule.

NBC thinks that they have an edgy Sunday morning news program, but no aware viewer of television news or commentary is fooled. The only edginess that anyone found was when MTP was anchored/moderated/lead by the nose by a substitute host.

NBC brought this on themselves by hiring David Gregory and keeping him in the moderator’s chair for so long, so I can’t feel sorry for them. Focusing on Meet The Press or any of its moderators / anchors / leaders by the noses people misses the larger point: the normalizing nature of Sunday morning.

The Sunday morning news discussion program is a vestigial form of television news from before the Reagan Administration. It was born in the 1950s, the dawn of competition between television networks, when light regulation by the FCC required both networks and affiliates to have certain kinds of programing purported to be in the interest of general public. The Sunday morning news program fit that bill - when nets and stations file their annual reports with the FCC about how they merit licensing, they point to this programming which is as dull as watching grass grow. The hangover of McCarthyism and biases of net and station ownership kept the viewpoint of vast majority of the programming center-right on the ideological spectrum. Since the Reagan Administration, the programming has been less necessary but the normativeness (sic) of the Sunday has stuck: consider the fact that the only programming that Fox News produces that Fox Networks affiliates broadcast is Fox News Sunday, and that premiered as Bill Clinton was seeking re-election as President. Consider also that Fox (or whatever Newscorp needed to create to be a player in the USA) felt it needed a Sunday morning news program - whether it is a function of creating an image as a full journalistic enterprise without regard to it’s ideological bent.

All Sunday morning news programming on networks serve to narrow the spectrum of acceptable views that can make up broadcast news. That is the larger, more important point than the quality of the work that David Gregory or Chuck Todd does.