NBC News has hired Ronna McDaniel, chairwoman of the recently defunct Republican National Committee (RNC), as an on-air contributor, and many of her new colleagues are fleeing for their safe spaces.
Chuck Todd, the former NBC host Meet the press, appeared on her old show with host Kristen Welker over the weekend and assailed the network for hiring McDaniel after all the “gaslighting” that occurred at the RNC during his reign. She went on to suggest that the network had put Welker, who had just interviewed McDaniel, in a horrible position.
A great moment on Meet the Press this morning. pic.twitter.com/1RKvAq7mj2
—Mike Hixenbaugh (@Mike_Hixenbaugh) March 24, 2024
Todd wasn’t alone: Good morning Joe co-hosts Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski were equally outraged.
Morning Joe hosts attack their employer @NBCNewsfor hiring @RonnaMcDaniel: “We were not asked for our opinion on the hiring, but if we had done so we would have strongly opposed it.” pic.twitter.com/llifVrosY4
— Tom Elliott (@tomselliott) March 25, 2024
That’s a lot of hand-wringing for a cable channel hiring a former politician to provide opinion commentary — a turn of events that’s not remotely unprecedented.
Indeed, Todd’s suggestion that his bosses may have transgressed journalistic norms by hiring and interviewing a political operative with potentially mixed loyalties is quite rich considering, well, the existence of Jen Psaki. Psaki, of course, is the host of her own show on MSNBC, although she previously worked as White House press secretary for President Joe Biden. There wasn’t a huge time gap between these two positions; instead, she negotiated her move to cable TV while she was still working within the administration.
Psaki was a paid CNN contributor before working for Biden and, before that, was part of the Obama administration. It’s almost as if there’s a revolving door between working in politics and being paid by the media to talk about politics, and liberal journalists didn’t find this particularly controversial until about 5 seconds ago. In fact, Scarborough is himself a former Republican member of Congress. Nicolle Wallace, President George W. Bush’s former communications director, also has a show on MSNBC. (The network has a type, and that type is the ex-Republican turned anti-Trump fanatic.)
Then there’s Symone Sanders, who went from Bernie Sanders’ 2016 campaign to CNN, then joined Biden’s 2020 campaign, became spokesperson for Vice President Kamala Harris, and finally ended up with her own show on… MSNBC. To be clear, this practice of hiring former Washington insiders to provide commentary is standard practice in cable news; it’s not even remotely limited to MSNBC. Donna Brazile, who previously served as interim chair of the Democratic National Committee, has been a paid contributor on CNN, ABC and Fox News. Fox also employs Dana Perino, Bush’s former White House spokesperson. And, of course, ABC News hired George Stephanopoulos, Bill Clinton’s former White House communications director, as a correspondent and political analyst even though he had no prior experience in journalism.
The selective indignation towards McDaniel is therefore quite rich.
What’s really happening here is that mainstream media figures don’t like McDaniel because of the work he did on Donald Trump’s behalf. But unlike the group of Trump-hating Republican commentators, McDaniel is actually in a position to educate viewers about Trump’s appeal to a significant portion of the electorate. If they don’t like what she says, other on-air personalities can challenge her. That’s the whole point of cable news commentary, right?