Another Major News Anchor Announces Surprise Exit Days After Jim Acosta’s CNN Departure

Former Meet the Press moderator Chuck Todd is leaving NBC News after nearly two decades, he told colleagues in a memo issued Friday, Jan. 31. The news comes more than a year after Todd exited Meet the Press and just days after fellow tenured news anchor Jim Acosta announced his exit from CNN after 18 years.

“There’s never a perfect time to leave a place that’s been a professional home for so long, but I’m pretty excited about a few new projects that are on the cusp of going from ‘pie in the sky’ to ‘near reality,’” Todd, 52, told NBC News staffers in a memo obtained by Variety. “So I’m grateful for the chance to get a jump start on my next chapter during this important moment.”

Todd, who started at NBC News in 2007 as a political director, assured his colleagues that he would “continue to share my reporting and unique perspective of covering politics with data and history as important baselines in understanding where we were, where we are and where we’re going” and would be still working on his podcast, The Chuck Toddcast.

Having his career at NBC News span “two decades and five presidents” was the “honor of a lifetime,” Todd gushed. But in the current media and political climate, the journalist said it’s a “ripe moment” to do something new and meaningful.

“The media has a lot of work to do to win back the trust of viewers/listeners/readers and I’m convinced the best place to start is from the bottom up,” he wrote, adding, “The only way to fix this information eco-system is to stop whining about the various ways the social media companies are manipulating things and instead roll up our collective sleeves and start with local.”

“National media can’t win trust back without having a robust partner locally and trying to game algorithms is no way to inform and report,” he noted. “People are craving community and that’s something national media or the major social media companies can’t do as well as local media.”

NBC News confirmed Todd’s exit in a statement: “We’re grateful for Chuck’s many contributions to our political coverage during his nearly two-decade career at NBC News and for his deep commitment to Meet the Press and its enduring legacy. We wish him all the best in his next endeavors.”

Todd’s exit from NBC News comes just days after Acosta announced on Jan. 28 that he would be exiting CNN “after giving all of this some careful consideration and [after] weighing alternative time slots CNN offered me.”

The 53-year-old anchor reportedly butted heads with the network over the decision to move his show to a midnight time slot, sources told The New York Times. Acosta reportedly resisted the move and questioned if the network’s lineup reorganization was an attempt to sideline journalists who had been critical of President Donald Trump.