Insurrectionists And Journalists
The Ronna McDaniel saga and the revelations on American journalism
On March 22, NBC News management announced a new member who would be joining the news outlet as a contributor. By March 26, that member was fired. The chaotic media saga of NBC hiring former RNC Chairwoman Ronna McDaniel ended with the age-old political referencing puns comparing and calculating against other short-lived political figures in the public sphere.
Former Trump White House Communications Director Anthony Scaramucci, who was fired after working for 11 days in the White House, poked fun at McDaniel by tweeting this.
OK here is the official scoring on at @RonnaMcDaniel
At @msnbc :0.1 Scaramucci’s
At @NBCNews : 0.27 but we are generous and round up so 0.3 Scaramuccis
The conservative lawyer George Conway piled on the joke by tweeting with an international reference.
IMPERIAL SYSTEM FINAL RESULTS
Ronna @MSNBC : 0.018 Trusses
Ronna @NBCNews : 0.051 Trusses
All jokes aside, McDaniel’s hiring, controversy, and subsequent firing is a revealing story of how US journalism operates, and the problems it faces as it goes into the 2024 election.
Before we continue, it is important to note two groups of figures here. The first group I want you to note are the executives at NBC News, which also control MSNBC, CNBC, Telemundo, and local NBC affiliates in different cities and states. The most notable of the executives that normally nobody notices include NBC News Chairman Cesar Conde, Vice President Carrie Budoff Brown, NBC News President Rebecca Blumenstein, and MSNBC President Rashida Jones. I will get back to them in a moment but do keep them in your mind for the rest of the piece.
The second group of figures only consists of one, Ronna Romney McDaniel. Fun tidbit, Ronna ditched the Romney in her name after Donald Trump said he didn’t like that, and it in a nutshell described McDaniel’s legacy and her history before she got hired by NBC News. Ronna McDaniel resigned from the post of RNC Chairwoman this February following advice from the former president, she was most well-known during her reign for helping transform the RNC under Trump’s control. That transformation most notably included turning the group’s wealth into a legal slush fund for Donald Trump as he faced legal woes in the courts, as well as playing a key role in enabling the challenging of the election results after the 2020 election. Quoting the New York Times.
Of the major figures involved in Mr. Trump’s bid to keep power, Ms. McDaniel had received relatively scant attention. She is only now facing intense scrutiny after NBC journalists revolted over their network’s decision to hire her as an on-air contributor, leading to an abrupt end to her days-long relationship with the network.
Ms. McDaniel had recently tried to downplay her role. But a review of her record shows she was, at times, closely involved in and supportive of Mr. Trump’s legal and political maneuvering ahead of the violent attempt to block Congress from certifying Mr. Biden’s victory on Jan. 6.
Ms. McDaniel was not the most aggressive or outlandish member of Mr. Trump’s team. Indeed, she fell short of Mr. Trump’s demands and expectations, former aides said, and faced calls from his allies and grass-roots activists to be far more aggressive. And her involvement appears to have fallen off substantially — at least publicly — in the days before Jan. 6, when the R.N.C. focused its efforts on the then-upcoming Senate runoff election in Georgia.
Later, after courts, Republican election officials and state investigations all dismissed Mr. Trump’s claims of fraud, Ms. McDaniel was viewed as insufficiently dedicated to the cause of overturning the election, particularly by the Trump supporters who still considered Mr. Trump the rightful winner.
But before then, Ms. McDaniel, who through intermediaries declined to comment for this article, had done more to dispute a legitimate election result than any other chair of a major American political party in modern history.
After the hiring was announced on Friday, McDaniel was pushed to be one of the key guests on NBC’s flagship Sunday politics show Meet The Press with Kristen Welker. During the show, Welker informed the audience (after the interview with McDaniel) that she did not know she was coming to the show as a paid political analyst with a contract from her bosses, and said that she had no involvement in the process of hiring the former chairwoman. During the interview, McDaniel tried to defend her decisions as RNC chairwoman enabling Donald Trump and struggled to respond to questions proposed by Welker related to whether the 2020 election was legitimate.
Even more shockingly, the predecessor to Welker, Chuck Todd, made a vigorous critique of his superiors at NBC and McDaniel’s hiring after the interview, telling McDaniel “I think our bosses owe you an apology for putting you in this situation” given the “gaslighting” and “character assassination” the RNC under McDaniel’s watch has done to NBC reporters. In case you didn’t think the situation was bad through the written word, you can enjoy the full interview and Todd’s reaction in the video below.
After the interview, the backlash towards McDaniel escalated online from across the political spectrum. Liz Cheney, former Republican congresswoman and daughter of former Vice President Dick Cheney, tweeted on X.
Ronna facilitated Trump’s corrupt fake elector plot & his effort to pressure MI officials not to certify the legitimate election outcome.She spread his lies & called 1/6 “legitimate political discourse.” That’s not “taking one for the team.” It’s enabling criminality & depravity.
On MSNBC, which at the time still employed McDaniel (albeit over the weekend of McDaniel’s tenure, Rashida Jones informed employees that she would only appear on NBC News and not MSNBC), one of the most scathing critiques by their guests came from Timothy Snyder, the author of the book On Tyranny.
“What NBC has done is they’ve invited into what should be a normal framework someone who doesn’t believe that framework should exist at all.”
“What NBC has done of its own volition is bring into a very important conversation about democracy, one which is going to take place for the next seven months or so, someone who … tried to disassemble our democracy. Who personally took part in an attempt to undo the American system.”
Thanks to the fierce criticism from Chuck Todd (which some argued was not as brave of a move as some thought given NBC hasn’t renewed his contract since 2022 and presumably this is one of Todd’s last months working at the company), the staff revolt became more vocal inside 30 Rock (Where NBC locates in). The NBC News Guild was one of the first to criticize their bosses, saying “Our journalism is tarnished” while citing the unexplained firings of 20 former NBC journalists. The next day on the airwaves, hosts from Joe Scarborough and Mika Brezinski in the morning to Rachel Maddow and Lawerence O’Donnell on the prime-time pundit shows have all voiced dissent over the move. Tuesday evening, NBC News officially parted ways with McDaniel as a paid contributor, and the CAA (the talent agency that worked for McDaniel) announced they are ditching her as a client.
Fun insider fact, despite NBC’s announcement, it only means McDaniel will not be on the air. NBC still has to pay the money over the duration designated on her contract.
But before that story could even die down, Puck News wrote a devastating story about what happened right after McDaniel’s disastrous appearance on Meet The Press regarding the channel’s executives. Dylan Byers depicted a chaotic behind-the-scenes look in the echelons of 30 Rock.
In the subsequent days, however, it became clear that many of Conde’s most visible employees had a different interpretation. On Sunday, following McDaniel’s inaugural appearance on Meet the Press, during which she inelegantly swore off her previous election-denialism as merely part of her job responsibility, host emeritus Chuck Todd opened fire on his bosses on air—a landmark TV moment that essentially prompted a Dead Poets Society-style desk-jumping cascade. Over the next day, his MSNBC colleagues followed suit, each in their own unique and theatrical fashion, in shit-posting their bosses and denigrating McDaniel, an unprecedented all-hands-on-deck mutiny that laid bare both their pride and their prejudice. By Monday night, when Rachel Maddow began contextualizing McDaniel’s hire in a lengthy history of American fascism, it was evident that the former R.N.C. chief would be forced to take her talents, such as they are, elsewhere.
Indeed, the day-long pile-on evidenced a larger truth about the NBC News Group operation, and especially MSNBC, in the Maddow-Scarborough era: the talent runs the place. Their power is a testament to their own political influence and value to the brand, sure, but also to a convoluted organizational structure that Conde put in place over a year ago. A Wharton M.B.A. who once told top talent, “I don’t get into editorial,” Conde had never wanted to make tough programming calls. Instead, he tasked an ensemble of direct reports to lead siloed and misaligned fiefdoms, with no sole decisive leader to call the shots. (Such a figure, it goes without saying, would have inevitably threatened his own authority atop the network, too.) It worked well enough so long as nobody fucked up. But, of course, people fuck up.
Still, no one on the NBC News leadership team anticipated the open rebellion that took place this week. In fact, bringing McDaniel to 30 Rock had been part of a nearly two-month-long effort that was spearheaded by Budoff Brown and her boss, NBC News President Rebecca Blumenstein, with buy-in from Conde and his deputies at both NBC News and MSNBC. Like many news executives navigating this hyperpartisan political era, Budoff Brown and Blumenstein had been eager to find semi-palatable conservative voices who could offer insight into the Trump campaign and widen the aperture of perspectives on election night panels and Sunday morning roundtables. They saw McDaniel as that voice and, over the course of the recruiting process, Conde and several of his deputies embraced that idea as well.
The story suggests NBC News Chairman Cesar Conde and Vice President Carrie Budoff Brown were unnerved after McDaniel’s Meet The Press show. After the show ended, the head of the political unit at NBC News contacted the former chief of staff at the RNC Richard Walters to get contacts from friends or colleagues defending McDaniel’s honor. It also turned out NBC executives were willing to throw the former Biden Press Secretary turned MSNBC host Jen Psaki and Chuck Todd under the bus with bad coverage and criticism on social media, potentially with the approval of Conde.
Guess who was the head of the political unit at NBC News? Surprise, it’s Carrie Budoff Brown, who did not deny the story when asked about it on the record.
This then leads to the questions that are still unanswered going out of this chaotic journalistic saga. How much did the hosts and talent of NBC and MSNBC know of McDaniel’s hiring or are personally involved in the saga? Welker’s denial of being involved in hiring McDaniel does raise eyebrows, and so does Chuck Todd who only apologized to Welker but not the audience. Also, there were questions on whether top talent like Rachel Maddow or Joe Scarborough had pressured MSNBC management over the hiring. Keith Olbermann, a former MSNBC pundit, noted that he, Maddow, and Scarborough have all threatened to quit over hiring choices or management decisions that they think are not in their best interest.
Hence, this leads to the biggest moral out of the tortured saga of Ronna McDaniel: What to do with giving voices to a political party that has abandoned the principles you thought they possessed decades ago, and includes people who openly support violent insurrections and political coups trying to get back to the mainstream. In the business, two factors remain key: truthful and balanced. But given the situation when one party refuses to accept and express reality, many US media choose to be balanced rather than being truthful for fear of being accused as biased against them.
I see two things incredibly ridiculous coming out in reaction to the firing. Firstly, some conservative commentators have lambasted NBC for the firing because McDaniel is a conservative. MSNBC is not a conservative-free space, just look at their talent. Joe Scarborough was a Republican congressman; Nicolle Wallace worked as communications director for George W. Bush; Michael Steele was a former RNC chairman; and MSNBC contributor Charlie Sykes was a Wisconsin radio host and a co-founder of the center-right political website The Bulwark. In different media groups, many have hired Trump-era staffers as commentators or analysts.
It’s not a problem hiring former political players into politics is breaking news, as mentioned before, Jen Psaki worked in the Biden White House and now is an anchor on MSNBC. The problem with hiring McDaniel lies with her being aligned with election deniers and those in power that led to the January 6 Capitol Riots.
Plus, it’s not like hiring Republicans is going to help media groups gain more viewership. There isn’t a large group of MAGA voters who looked at NBC’s hiring of McDaniel and thought to themselves, “Wow, fake news NBC News has hired Ronna McDaniel, I gotta give these libtards a second chance!”
Another ridiculous thing I observed comes from inside NBC management. 2024 is a tough year for journalism, as an article from the Guardian can illustrate.
As the election battle between Donald Trump and Joe Biden begins, there are growing fears around the health of the US news media which has been struck by job losses, declining circulations, the closure or crippling of well-known brands and rise of new threats such as fake or AI-generated information on social media.
Evidence of this state of crisis abounds. Last year, more than 21,400 media jobs were lost, the highest since 2020, when 16,060 cuts were recorded when print was still in the process of being succeeded by digital news distribution. Major names including the Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times and Vice have taken serious hits, alongside scores of smaller brands and the total collapse of newcomers such as the Messenger.
Readership and income from digital production has been falling overall, and industry downsizing in 2024 appears to be accelerating. Meanwhile, social media is uncoupling as a referral service to news organizations, which hits both readership size and revenue generation. Meta has dropped its news tab from Facebook, Google is more unpredictable, and X has de-prioritized posts that contain outside referrals.
Readers are fleeing to mediums in which fresh dangers lurk, even when accounting for the partisan nature of some US news sites. The share of US adults who say they regularly get news from TikTok has more than quadrupled, from 3% in 2020 to 14% in 2023, yet such sites are subject to the threat of viral misinformation – whether deliberately sown or spread organically.
Alongside that, a decline of regional news outlets has led to what is termed “news deserts”, which are defined by UNC’s Hussman School of Journalism and Media as “a community, either rural or urban, with limited access to the sort of credible and comprehensive news and information that feeds democracy at the grassroots level”.
Remember the NBC News Guild who cited the unexplained firings of 20 journalists who worked in the company? There has been an increasing trend of news networks firing journalists who have brought their respective agencies award-winning pieces of journalism, and substituting them with pundits and talking heads for ungodly amounts of money for them to rant and shout on screen.
For these same executives, they have found the answer to what journalism should be like going into the 2024 election: Cosying up to Trump in case he wins. As Semafor’s Ben Smith had observed in the days leading up to McDaniel’s hiring:
Network insiders noticed on March 5, when, during MSNBC’s Super Tuesday broadcast of Trump’s primary wins, host Rachel Maddow indicated to producers off-camera that viewers had heard enough from the former president. MSNBC president Rashida Jones told production staff that she wanted to stay with his speech. Maddow mused live about the challenges of taking Trump’s comments on the fly and “allowing somebody to knowingly lie on your air.”
Six days later, CNBC welcomed the former president back to Squawk Box for a phone-in interview primarily conducted by right-leaning host Joe Kernen.
And while those decisions were handled cordially inside the network, tensions flared when NBC News told the New York Times on Friday that it had hired former Republican National Committee chair Ronna McDaniel as an on-air commentator. The move was the culmination of a few weeks of discussions spearheaded by NBC News senior political vice president and its editorial president Rebecca Blumenstein, with signoff from MSNBC leadership and NBCUniversal news chief Cesar Conde, according to a company official.
As the possibility of a second Trump term, more willing to use state power to punish their political rivals and perceived enemies, looms at the distance. Corporate executives who own media conglomerates are willing to be on the good side which Trump’s potential administration will likely give them rewards. It is an especially sharp sticking point to NBC management, given the former president has threatened to use the government’s regulatory power to investigate the company and wants to take the “24 hour hit job” channel off the “FREE government approved airwaves” even though MSNBC is on cable and doesn’t use any government funding. Nonetheless, although the speculation could be far-fetched, it doesn’t stop executives from worrying over Trump’s authoritarian tendencies turning into reality.
Although this piece has heavily criticized NBC News, it’s an industry-wide phenomenon in all of the major news agencies. Ronna McDaniel’s hiring was being considered not just by NBC after her resignation as RNC chairwoman, both ABC and CNN have attempted to hire her but was rejected, potentially over the salary in the contract.
Quoting Keith Olbermann, the appeasement toward Trump could bring consequences.
The point of all this – and perhaps the value of this internal rebellion – is that perhaps the somnambulant American political media, especially the American TELEVISION political media – has awakened from its naïve stupor. I have been saying here for eighteen months that EVERY news organization in this country has had the same meeting: what do we do if Trump regains power. Not “what do we do journalistically” but what do we do to protect our profits – and what do we do so when Trump starts jailing reporters and TV executives, he’ll leave us alone. Or, more realistically, he’ll let us become one of his propaganda channels.
Remember, in the minds of its executives, television news isn’t a kind of NEWS, it’s a kind of TELEVISION. It is designed to fill the places between the commercials. If it serves some kind of public purpose, hey, great, as long as that doesn’t mean we have to go TOO many hours cancelling all those advertisements just because some POPE died or something.
Putting Trump on and taking Mehdi Hasan off and hiring Ronna McDaniel was INOCULATION, nothing more, nothing less. It was proving to Trump and the MAGAs that while no, we aren’t shuttering MSNBC and we’re not in favor of this whole “end the peaceful transfer of power” and “fascism is the new democracy” stuff – hey, go on… we’re listening.
American TV news isn’t going to save us from creeping fascism. But maybe – MAYBE – the scattered, largely selfish, righteous-ehhh-kinda righteous indignation at NBC means American TV news will stop HELPING fascism creep faster. Guard rail? No. Scattering spike strips across democracy’s highways? Uhh, ok, maybe we’ll stop.
Hopefully, the media can finally learn the lessons that got Trump elected in 2016 and have failed to cover him fairly and rightly for the past 9 years. Because if not now, when will they ever learn?