NBC faces blowback for booking a Trump town hall Thursday up against Biden's on ABC.

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37. Good points.

I still love Rachel - she's the "show of record" at our house and the one show not to miss. I always feel like I'm attending a master class in something, and it fascinates me how she backs into the lead.

Chris Hayes - meh. He's not my favorite. Your criticism is certainly accurate. But I'm frankly still smarting over how fervently he pushed Bernie Sanders on his show in 2016. Had him on once a week, for Pete's Sake! I find myself thinking - this kid has a primetime show? What about all the other folks who are good enough but were passed over, for him?

Nicolle Wallace is pretty good, too. She does have potential and I love the way you expressed what you hope to see. She seems genuine. Anticipation, INDEED! But, that said, she's a former GOP actor in this drama, so I can only say she "seems" that way. I want to like her - but I have a basic distrust of anyone who has a "used to be GOP-anything" in their resume. HAVE THEY really seen the light? HAVE they seen the error of their republi-CON ways? Or how soon will they "go back home" to their bad old ways? Which is the same way I feel about talking heads like Steve Schmidt and Rick Wilson and so many others now. I don't completely trust them. Glad they're on our side - NOW. Glad they SEEM to have had some sort of epiphany, and reject their old thinking - SEEMINGLY, anyway. But I need to see more longterm PROOF of that. I need to see a track record here. Over years. AND different presidential administrations.

Like Lawrence O'Donnell, and I trust him. HE has a longterm track record of reliability.

Ari Melber should lay off the "look how hip I am" stuff. Quoting rapper lyrics to make a point - does everyone in his audience understand the fine points of that particular poetry?

One of my real favorites is Katy Tur. I used to work with her dad from time to time - at least when we were all out there in the field, covering stuff. She's impressed me tremendously. She's done the "toiling in the back of the vineyard," and has earned the anchor position she has now. She does a GREAT job and can come up with a real haymaker of a question, or a point, on a fairly regular basis. I like how she thinks!

AND, bias here - I've always appreciated how she'll give the time check at the top of her show in Pacific time first, and THEN the Eastern time. When I was working - news managers and decision makers at the network level behaved as though the West Coast just didn't exist. It was all New York-centered, ALL THE TIME! And if it happened in New York, it led the newscast, whether you cared or it affected you at all - in Los Angeles, Seattle, Vegas, Phoenix, or Coeur d'Alene. I remember being an anchor on NBC Radio when New York City hd a power failure. I was ORDERED to lead with it. I argued - Hey, I'm in Burbank, here. What do I care that there was a power failure in New York? Why is that the lead story for me? And the answer came back (FROM my producer in New York) - that power failure affects five million people, so you WILL lead with it. And I did. Wasn't happy about it and I disagreed on behalf of everybody west of the Mississippi, but I complied.

As for Joy Reid, I always like seeing somebody who "toiled in the back of the vineyard" for quite some time finally getting elevated from the minors to the majors. She earned this! She's a little scattered sometimes, but that's forgivable.