NBC White House correspondent Chuck Todd is a neo-Luddite and he doesn’t even know it. In a brief impromptu video clip, Todd said that, “there is no worse crime in journalism these days than simply deciding something’s a story because Drudge links to it.”

So forget plagiarism, intentional misinformation, news fabrication -– remember the New York Times’s Jayson Blair? –- intentional shilling for a political philosophy or politician, and just plain incompetence. None, according to Todd, are as journalistically “criminal,” in the non-judicial sense, as taking a story cue from Matt Drudge.

Gen. Ludd

Todd is replicating the two-hundred years old whine of the early 19th-century Luddites.  Here’s a brief reminder of the movement of British textile workers led by General Ned Ludd between 1811-1816: (more…)