Cleanup on aisle three
It took NBC five days to dig one of those big walk-behind floor sweepers out of a supply closet and get it running down the hall on the C-suite floor at 30 Rock where the detritus of the Ronna McDaniel hiring was beginning to turn putrid. Even still, the smell hasn’t left the building. It’s going to take a while for the story to come out about how and why McDaniel was hired as a political commentator for the network. The former Chair of the Republican National Committee, McDaniel is a Trump mouthpiece who was complicit in the campaign to overturn the 2020 election results and regularly repeated Trump’s lies that the election had been “rigged.” She was also part of Trump’s years-long effort to denigrate the news media that covered him while he was president and as he masterminded the attempted coup to prevent the certification of electoral ballots and the peaceful transfer of power after the 2020 presidential election.
How does this kind of trainwreck happen at a distinguished television network, you might ask? Over cocktails and candlelit dinners at extraordinarily expensive restaurants, that’s how. When the McDaniel hire was announced, it came out that she was hired after she had formed what was called a good relationship with two executives at NBC who were involved in convincing McDaniel to allow NBC to host one of the Republican primary debates. The NBC executives who did the romancing of McDaniel are Carrie Budoff Brown, who oversees NBC News political coverage, and Rebecca Blumenstein, the NBC News president. “Ronna had a good experience with Carrie and Rebecca,” an unnamed source “close to McDaniel” told Politico yesterday, explaining why she decided to go with the NBC offer of employment after also being approached by CNN and ABC News.
“A good experience” is corporate-speak for the way the three of them became buddies during negotiations to get NBC the Republican debate, even though McDaniel would not agree to allow MSNBC, the network’s liberal affiliate, to simulcast the debate. So, it came as a surprise over the weekend when Politico reported that the “deal was unanimously supported by leaders of all their networks, according to an NBC insider, including by Rashida Jones, president of MSNBC.”
It didn’t take Jones long to backtrack after McDaniel’s appearance on the Sunday NBC talk show, Meet the Press, however. Chuck Todd lambasted the hiring of McDaniel in an interview with anchor Kristen Welker right after McDaniel walked off the Meet the Press set, causing himself to gain a gravitas absolutely no one thought he had before that moment on Sunday, proving that even a hack pundit can smell the coffee, especially when it’s burning and threatening to cause a fire.
After Budolph Brown announced that McDaniel was being hired to appear “across all NBC News platforms,” Jones announced that hosts on MSNBC would not be required to have McDaniel on their shows. As it emerged that the McDaniel contract was for $300,000 even as other contributors were being laid off, hosts of MSNBC shows unloaded. Nicole Wallace called McDaniel “an election denier.” Joy Reid told her viewers that McDaniel “literally backed an illegal scheme to steal an election in the state of Michigan.”
Jen Psaki, who was hired from her position as press secretary to Joe Biden, contrasted herself with McDaniel this way: “Look, this is not about Republicans versus Democrats. This is not about red versus blue. This is about truth versus lies. Service to the country versus service to one man committed to toppling our democratic system," Then Rachel Maddow devoted the first 29 minutes of her show last night to the McDaniel hire, accusing her of covering for a man, Donald Trump, who was “using the rights and privileges of a democracy to end democracy.”
“You wouldn’t hire a wise guy, a made-man like a mobster, to work in a DA’s office. You wouldn’t hire a pickpocket to work as a TSA screener. And so, I find the decision to put her [McDaniel] on the payroll inexplicable.”
But it’s not inexplicable. The hiring of a rancid fascist who conspired with Donald Trump to try to overturn an election is just one more example of the rot at the top of the mainstream media in this country. Look at the front page of the New York Times, which has pounded “Biden is old” like a bass drum. Donald Trump has been promising to let felons convicted of attacking police officers with batons and flag poles out of jail, and the New York Times treats his threat like just another policy position, as if Joe Biden is against pardons, but Donald Trump is for them. It’s amazing the Times hasn’t already offered the fired Ronna McDaniel an op ed page column with a six-figure salary.
Until this afternoon in the C-suites at 30 Rock, they still believed there are two sides to the truth and people like Ronna McDaniel should be paid three hundred grand a year to parrot the Trump side, so NBC won’t be seen as taking one side over the other.
The problem is, there aren’t two sides when it comes to fascism. To believe otherwise and give a Trump sock-puppet like McDaniel a voice on your network is not just foolhardy, it’s deadly to democracy.
"How does this kind of trainwreck happen at a distinguished television network, you might ask?"
Two women with lousy judgment who didn't deserve to have the jobs they had at NBC is how.
Maybe they'll be the next to go.
And can't you just imagine the ABC and CNN brass feeling as though they dodged a bullet?
“There aren’t two sides when it comes to fascism.” Lucian, you summed it up. This mania for “two sides to every story” has bankrupted newspapers and news organizations. I’ve been dumbfounded by NYT coverage of Trump and Biden. For one thing, they need to fire Maggie Haberman. She is Trump’s mouthpiece, nothing more. His side of the story is all she can report, because he demands loyalty. If she isn’t loyal to him, he cuts off her access. And these news organizations are too damn scared to write: We will no longer be quoting Donald Trump, because getting those quotes requires the loyalty to him of our reporters. And that is unacceptable to us.