Since Kristen Welker replaced Chuck Todd as the moderator of Meet the Press, it has been a favorite of those in the key Adults 25-54 demographic.
The Sunday political affairs programs have been under assault — especially from conservative media members — in recent years. Hosts like Welker, ABC’s George Stephanopoulos, and CBS’ Margaret Brennan are often labeled friendly to liberal lawmakers and adversaries to conservatives.
For the record, I don’t share those beliefs. And I think it’s especially difficult to use those labels when the episode of Meet the Press I watched included former South Dakota Governor and current Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem (R) and Sen. Eric Schmitt (R-MO) as the more high-profile guests on the program.
As I sat down to watch Meet the Press, the first thing that struck me was how different the presentation was to what I’ve been normally watching. Admittedly, I don’t think there’s a fantastic way to begin a TV news show like this in 2025, but a two-minute opening montage of what you’re going to talk about in the next hour feels antiquated.
It’s the “here’s an announcement that we’re going to be making an announcement” of the TV world. Seriously, pull up a YouTube video of any type that begins with two minutes of the host talking about what they’re going to talk about. See how long you make it. It isn’t long.
I understand that I can only share my point of view, but as a millennial, two minutes of “Here’s what’s on the show today” is roughly 90 seconds of me no longer watching your show.
Cynically, one of my favorite exercises when listening to a new radio show — especially the beginning of the first hour — is thinking to myself “not in content yet”, and seeing how long that lasts. With Meet the Press, it was legitimately two minutes. The average millennial attention span is reportedly 12 seconds. While Meet the Press is the longest-running show in TV history, that doesn’t mean it’s immune to being flexible to today’s news consumer.
The content began with a Welker standup to introduce the hot topics of the week. Which is fine, if I hadn’t just sat through a two-minute montage of what the hottest topics of the week were and who would be on the show to analyze them.
It’s almost borderline insulting to the viewer. If I’m tuning into NBC on a Sunday morning to watch Kristen Welker, there’s a really high chance that I already know what the top stories of the week were. We live in an always-changing 24-hour news cycle. To say “Here’s what happened this week” feels slightly condescending to the viewer, truthfully, especially when one of the big news stories was the worst airline disaster since 9/11 that dominated the headlines for days.
Also, this is just personal preference, but I didn’t love the on-screen use of the huge window monitors behind Welker. While I think there can be a happy medium between a scaled-down graphic approach and the in-your-face graphics packages that perpetuate cable news TV screens, this use on Meet the Press made it feel as if the graphics were almost an afterthought.
Six minutes into the show, Welker began an interview with Noem. Her first question to Noem was whether or not the United States is now in a trade war with Canada, China, and Mexico due to new tariffs enacted by President Trump. She pitched the question to the Homeland Security Secretary as being immigration-adjacent, but it really fell flat for me. It appeared more like an opportunity to get someone like Noem — who is known to “step in it” from time to time — to potentially step in it again.
Noem was at the southern border for the conversation, which Welker addressed roughly four minutes into the interview. Throughout the interview, it appeared as if Welker wanted to interrupt the guest several times. But, to her credit, she held off. If I had to guess, the hesitancy was due to the delay between the two, which would have resulted in the pair talking over one another continually.
As that interview concluded, the tease for the next segment was “When we come back, Republican Senator Eric Schmitt joins me next.” That’s a weak tease. Eric Schmitt joins you to do…what, exactly? To talk about what? To discuss what? I pay relatively close attention to the Washington political scene, but I don’t know that I could tell the difference between Eric Schmitt and a Pizza Hut delivery driver if put in a lineup. Eric Schmitt isn’t a big enough name to waste a tease on. If the Republican Senator was Ted Cruz, Mitch McConnell, Tom Cotton, Tim Scott, Rick Scott, Rand Paul, John Kennedy, or Tommy Tuberville? Sure. You can just say “This high-profile Republican Senator joins me next.” But the tease of Schmitt’s existence felt like a waste.
I could go on with the nitpicks, but I think you get the picture.
I came away with the feeling that Kristen Welker has a handle on the subjects. She does a nice job commanding the show — steering the ship, so to speak. She’s well-prepared for her interviews, well-read, and knows her stuff. I empathize with the situation she’s in because she’s piloting a show that is an obviously has a longstanding sense of what it is, and maybe more importantly what it should be, and attempting to bring the show into a new age.
But watching Meet the Press — and maybe this episode was just an aberration — left me unimpressed. The segments were long, the interviews were long, some of the questions to the subjects made me question their purpose. It just didn’t reflect what — in my opinion — makes great television today.
Ultimately, it felt as if Meet the Press was more interested in continuing the tradition of what is has been rather than what it could be today. My sense was that the NBC News program was relying on the brand to carry a heavy load in drawing in viewers rather than the content. And when you’re using brand familiarity for success rather than the excellence of the product, I think that’s a bad strategy.
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Garrett Searight is Barrett Media’s News Editor, which includes writing bi-weekly industry features and a weekly column. He has previously served as Program Director and Afternoon Co-Host on 93.1 The Fan in Lima, OH, and is the radio play-by-play voice of Northern Michigan University hockey. Reach out to him at Garrett@BarrettMedia.com.
