Hey, all. Parker here.
Here’s a short story about everything that is wrong with the current state of the news media:
In January, NBC News laid off dozens of employees1 and ended Mehdi Hasan’s MSNBC show. Two and a half months later, the company hired former Republican National Committee Chairwoman Ronna McDaniel as a political analyst with a reported salary of $300,000 per year.
On Sunday, she made her first paid appearance on NBC during Meet the Press. Here’s how it went:
Oh boy. So let’s talk a bit about that today, I guess.
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In thinking about this over the weekend, I’ve landed on what I think are four of the most important takeaways from her hiring. Let’s go through them.
It’s never a good thing when money that could be going to actual journalism is instead given to highly paid part-time “political analysts.”
Yes, NBC News, the company that just six weeks ago laid off dozens of employees, has a reported $300,000 in the budget for big-name political operatives who exist to echo party lines without contributing anything new to public understanding. It’s wild, isn’t it?
“So many talented reporters laid off this year,” tweeted Brandy Zadrozny, an NBC News senior reporter. “Workers who provided the content, won the awards, built the credibility of their shops, and worked for a yearly salary at a fraction of what big name contributors get in fancy contracts to fill pundit boxes on TV.”
She’s right. Laying off journalists and replacing them with talking heads demonstrates a lack of commitment to credibility. This is true in TV, in print magazines, and in newspapers. Maybe it makes business sense, but it makes clear that the network’s actual credibility means less to them than whatever benefit they get out of this.
McDaniel is terrible in a way unique to the MAGA-est of the MAGAs.
Yes, of course, she has tweets from less than a year ago calling MSNBC’s primetime lineup “propagandists” who “wasted countless hours pushing the Russia collusion hoax.” Sure. I get that. That’s not what makes her extra awful as a hire for any news organization, in my view.
No, what makes her hiring exceptionally bad is that she was personally involved in the illegal “fake elector” plot to install Trump for a second term despite his electoral loss. Her involvement in this scheme was reported on quite a bit by NBC News! So it’s not as though they don’t know. Just… how? How do you justify hiring someone who, again, was personally involved in an autocoup attempt? How do you justify hiring someone who has so greatly contributed to the spread of that provably false belief that the election was “stolen” and still won’t admit that it was without issues?2
Daily Beast columnist and former CNN contributor Wajahat Ali tweeted about something a producer once told him about the depressingly low standards cable news outlets have for conservative commentators:
McDaniel, notably, does not meet these standards, as she’s spent the past four years claiming that the election was stolen. Even after being hired by NBC News, McDaniel continues to argue that “there were problems” in the 2020 election. There really, truly were not. It was just as smooth as any other election, and clinging to the claim that there were “problems” in it is just another form of denial.
“The bar has been lowered, added Ali on Twitter.
This is a continuation of NBC News — and mainstream media’s, generally — years-long effort to pander to conservative audiences.
Variety Senior TV Editor Brian Steinberg argued that “McDaniel’s hire would raise even more eyebrows if NBC News hadn’t become so practiced in recent years at luring talent in bids aimed at winning over conservatives.”
He’s right, and he backs up his argument with a non-exhaustive3 list of Trump-era moves aimed at boosting conservative viewership via hiring and editorial decisions.
As the Republican Party accelerated its far-right trajectory around the time of Trump’s 2016 campaign, mainstream media’s Overton window shifted to the right. Soon, outlets began to treat “Never Trump” Republicans as a stand-in for the median voter and primary audience. Suddenly, “the middle” consisted of people who agree with 90% of Trump’s policies, a hard shift rightward. And after Trump won in 2016, the press lurched even more to the right. No such leftward media realignment occurred with Democratic wins in 2018 and 2020. As I wrote in 2022:
Okay, I thought. Maybe the rightward lurch of media that followed Trump’s 2016 win will be countered by a leftward correction following his 2020 loss. No such luck, as evidenced by the flurry of right-wing hires at mainstream news outlets following Trump’s loss (former Weekly Standard editor-in-chief Stephen Hayes was hired by NBC, Liberal Fascism author and National Review editor-in-chief Jonah Goldberg was scooped up by CNN, which also hired former Trump aide Alyssa Farrah; and former acting White House chief of staff Mick Mulvaney was hired by CBS as a paid contributor to, as CBS News president Neeraj Khemlani said, to “make sure that we are getting access to both sides of the aisle,” and saying that it was “a priority because we know the Republicans are going to take over, most likely, in the midterms,” and that “a lot of the people that we’re bringing in are helping us in terms of access to that side of the equation”). The truth is that when Republicans win, the mainstream press feels the need to move to the right because they’re out of touch, and when Democrats win, the mainstream press feels the need to move to the right because it’s only a matter of time before Republicans win again. The answer to the millionaires and billionaires making these decisions is always to find an excuse to shift to the right.
These types of hires are unethical monstrosities.
NBC News Chief Political Analyst Chuck Todd even touched on this point during Sunday’s Meet the Press:
When NBC made the decision to give her NBC News’ credibility, you’ve got to ask yourself what does she bring NBC News. And when we make deals like this, and I’ve been at this company a long time, you’re doing it for access. Access to audience. Sometimes it’s access to an individual. And we can have a journalistic ethics debate about that. I’m willing to have that debate.
We absolutely should have that debate. What sort of message is being sent here? As Todd gets at during the segment, McDaniel’s tenure at the RNC marked a massive anti-NBC News ice-out:
There’s a reason why there’s a lot of journalists at NBC News uncomfortable with this, because many of our professional dealings over the past six years have been met with gaslighting, have been met with character assassination.
Why reward her for this? And yes, to Todd’s question, what does she bring to NBC News? This is a part-time job, and she’s supposedly getting paid $300,000 per year to do it. Is NBC News actually interested in $300,000 worth of McDaniel’s political commentary? Of course not. NBC is paying her a hefty fee for access to the right. Whatever TV appearances she makes are secondary to this. And of course, these types of access deals happen all the time and across party lines. That said, it’s bizarre to directly reward someone whose job until just a few weeks ago was to be uncooperative and antagonistic towards the very idea of your company’s core values.
Boo. Bad hire, NBC News. As Democratic strategist Max Burns notes:
Related reading.
“Trust and Accountability Matter” (America, America,
, 3/25/24)“Ronna McDaniel defends call pressuring canvassers not to sign 2020 election certification” (The Detroit News, Craig Mauger, 3/24/24)
“NBC News Keeps Chasing Conservatives With Controversial Talent Moves” (Variety, Brian Steinberg, 3/24/24)
“NBC News hires Ronna McDaniel, who played a key role in Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election, according to NBC News” (Media Matters for America, John Knefel, 3/22/24)
“What Is NBC News Even Thinking Hiring Ronna McDaniel?” (The New Republic, Tori Otten, 3/22/24)
“Mainstream Media’s Rightward Lurch” (Dame Magazine, Parker Molloy, 7/11/22)
“MSNBC’s year of standing up straight” (Politico, Hadas Gold, 6/1/16)
That’s it for me today. As always, thank you for reading.
Parker
During the interview, she did that thing that conservatives do where when they’re asked if Biden won the election, they sidestep it by saying “he is the president” or otherwise obfuscating what they actually mean. They will avoid answering the simple question of “Did Joe Biden legitimately win the 2020 presidential election?” with a simple “yes” or “no,” and instead add various rephrasings or caveats. They do this as though people won’t notice that they’re refusing to directly answer questions. They want to be able to act like they’re not election deniers, all while continuing to spread the lie about there being “problems” with the election. Boo.
Steinberg mentions the Megyn Kelly hire, Nicolle Wallace’s hosting slot, CNBC’s gamble on Shepard Smith, and Marc Short’s contributor role at NBC News. There are a number of other examples, such as the hiring of conservative radio host Hugh Hewitt, but at a certain point, the list of efforts to “connect with conservatives” would just get unwieldy.
Never forget that in 2009, the year of our first Black president, our first woman Speaker and a Democratic trifecta that included (for a short time) a filibuster-proof Senate majority, the most frequent guest on Meet the Press was … Newt Gingrich. When Republicans are in charge, the line is “Well, they’re in charge.” When Democrats are in charge, the line is “Well, Democrats are in charge so we have to make room for the other side.”
One other thing, from the transcript:
“STEPHEN HAYES: Yeah. I mean, look, on the other hand, if you've read some of the criticism of NBC that has come since the announcement it is very clear that some of the critics just don't want to be confronted with Republican voices or conservative arguments. So there is that. And that's bad. We should want to have a robust exchange between people who believe different things.”
Now, I grant you, he followed that up with
“But I agree with what's been said here. I mean, that's not what Ronna McDaniel is doing. That's not what she's been doing. And she has huge credibility problems, not because she's been a partisan spinner on behalf of the Republican Party, but because she not only presided but directed, drove, the QAnonization of the Republican Party during her tenure.”
But still. Tell me what Republican voices or conservative arguments I haven't been exposed to or confronted with in the past 40 years.
I'm not asking not to be "confronted" (nice choice of words there, never used in talking about conservatives) with Republican ideas; I'm asking our political news media not to take seriously that which has been proven not to be serious. Just like every other desk of the newspaper/newscast/website does. They take into account the track record of the people who contact them with "ideas" and "stories" and "scoops." The people who make six and seven figures covering national politics not only do not do this -- they are proud that they do not do this. They sneer at you when you point out that they are not doing it, and double down on it.
excellent analysis, Parker, thank you. WaPo reports this morning that NBC is so far standing with the hire or at least hasn't announced any change. how long is that viable in the face of blowback that started Friday and seems still furious this morning? is the calculation that the rw viewers they'll gain will more than compensate for the loss of many loyal viewers?
you point to something I have yet to see addressed explicitly, which is why American political media is so right-wing-focused, so eager to understand those voters and represent their views while totally ignoring the views of the majority. was there a single story, just one, in 2016 about Clinton voters/supporters? don't think so. we're a silent majority not bc we're not politically disengaged but bc we literally don't exist in the minds of those who control newsrooms and, I guess, their reporters and producers. I get that early on, after Trump's shock win, there was a collective spasm of anxiety at having missed the story. but in the big (ongoing) pile of stories that resulted, was there ever one single one on voters who actually like Clinton? apparently not. which helped reinforce the idea that *nobody* liked her yet she was absolutely going to win, so they needed to do everything they could to smear her.
I'm sick of being invisible or worse, presumed not to exist, when many millions are like me frustrated, worried, trying to understand the baffling firehose of daily news and figure out how I can act in accordance with my principles to help get GOPs who are anti-governance the hell out of government.