NBC Nightly News Top Producer Dishes to Mediaite About Tom Llamas’ Splashy Midterm Interviews

Credit: NBC News

NBC Nightly News anchor Tom Llamas is going the extra mile to get both sides of the country’s most competitive Senate races in the hot seat — and executive producer Matt Frucci gave Mediaite a behind-the-scenes look.

For the second week in a row, Llamas has secured one-on-one interviews with both major-party candidates in a closely-watched Senate race — first with Democrat Abdul El-Sayed and Republican Mike Rogers in Michigan, and now with Democrat Josh Turek and Republican Ashley Hinson in Iowa.

In a Wednesday interview with Mediaite, Frucci, who oversees both Nightly News and Top Story, explained that covering both sides requires considerable coordination with the campaigns — and plenty of travel.

Earlier Wednesday, for instance, Llamas flew into Omaha, NE, then drove to western Iowa to interview Hinson. He then faced another three-hour drive to interview Turek.

And that’s just part of the day’s itinerary.

“In the middle, he’s going to talk to some voters. He’s going to talk to some farmers. He’s going to stop by an early voting location,” Frucci continued. “That kind of shows the lengths that we’re going to, to make sure that we are getting both sides when we go out on a big reporting trip like this.”

Last week, Llamas made headlines for his particularly contentious exchange with El-Sayed over his family’s alleged ties to the Muslim Brotherhood.

The confrontation followed an appearance on Meet the Press, during which El-Sayed told Kristen Welker that neither he nor his family had links to the Islamist movement. Llamas confronted the Democratic candidate with resurfaced social media posts from his half-sister — whom he didn’t grow up with — that seemed to imply otherwise.

“Are you serious?” El-Sayed fired back.

When Llamas kept pressing, El-Sayed accused the anchor of relying on “hearsay evidence from a tweet” and demanded to know whether he was suggesting the candidate had lied.

“I don’t know. That’s why I’m asking,” Llamas responded.

Asked how he viewed the heated exchange from a producer’s perspective, Frucci said, “I think Tom’s journalism in his interview kind of stands for itself. I think that Tom is not afraid to ask tough questions, but more importantly, his goal is to ask the right questions.”

Describing Llamas’ mindset going into conversations like these, the executive producer elaborated, “What is it that viewers need to understand about the candidate? What are the issues across voters’ minds right now?”

In Michigan, the anchor also challenged Rogers over his past support for President Donald Trump’s war with Iran, which the Republican has made an effort to distance himself from, while in Iowa, he pressed Hinson over her especially ironic ask for supporters to help cover gas costs for her campaign bus, as well as her positions on Russia and Iran.

“I don’t think we go into this saying we have to have an equal number of these types of questions and an equal number of those types of questions,” Frucci explained.

Instead, he said, a team researches the issues voters care about in each state and develops questions accordingly, “no matter what those questions are.”

The approach comes amid a period of ratings momentum for Nightly News, which, according to NBC, has recorded 37 consecutive weeks of year-over-year audience growth.

Llamas succeeded Lester Holt in 2025, taking the helm of the long-running evening newscast, which first premiered in 1970.

“The more they get to know Tom, the more they like Tom, the more they want to see more of Tom,” Frucci added, crediting the anchor’s willingness to travel and engage directly with voters and officials.

Despite the growing number of online alternatives available to political candidates, the executive producer maintained that a national evening newscast remains an important platform.

“We get six to seven million viewers on Nightly News, and those viewers still matter,” he said.

“Campaigns do have other ways of reaching viewers,” he acknowledged, but argued that his program remains one of the best places for candidates to reach Americans through what he described as a “fair prism.”

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