I read somewhere Tuesday that the hiring of former Republican National Committee chair Ronna McDaniel by NBC as a paid contributor last week may have been a strategic hedge by the network in the unfortunate event that Donald Trump manages to ride anger, unreason, and chicanery to victory in (or after) the November election.
While you can never rule out corporate cowardice and bet-hedging as motivating factors, I’m guessing it was the misguided desire to “win over” MAGA America (like that might happen!) that drove this incredibly short-sighted decision.
Thing blew up fast, though, and on Tuesday NBC reversed course in the face of a fierce public rebellion by MSNBC on-air talent in opposition to the media conglomerate hiring a vocal proponent of Trump’s big election lie. The Washington Post writes:
The outrage over her appointment was indicative of the larger struggle television networks have faced in hiring pundits to offer a pro-Trump perspective without running afoul of both the audience and their own employees.
A “pro-Trump perspective”? Well, fuck that. I’m confident I speak for all non-MAGA Americans when I say we would strongly prefer a pro-truth, pro-democracy perspective. The “pro-Trump perspective” is built on lies, vengeance, and conspiracy theories. Which are not valid “perspectives.” Is that so hard to understand, corporate media?
McDaniel for years has been one of the toadiest and lickingest of Trump toadies and bootlickers. She essentially disowned her uncle, Mitt Romney, as a show of fealty to Trump, who hates Mitt because — to his credit — the longtime Utah senator and 2012 Republican nominee for president sees Trump for who he is and is among the tiny percentage of party leaders who has consistently warned Americans about what a Trump return to the Oval Office would mean for democracy.
McDaniel, however, went far beyond fealty to enable the worst of Trump’s corrosive falsehoods about the election. Here she trots out the “I was just being a good soldier” excuse for her active role in attempting to subvert democracy:
Liz Cheney wasn’t having any of it:
“Ronna facilitated Trump’s corrupt fake elector plot and his effort to pressure [Michigan] officials not to certify the legitimate election outcome,” Cheney tweeted. “She spread his lies and called 1/6 ‘legitimate political discourse.’ That’s not ‘taking one for the team.’ It’s enabling criminality & depravity.”
And NBC thought it would be a splendid idea to hire a person who, as Cheney correctly notes, enabled criminality and depravity. On top of that, it’s clear that on-air personalities — stars such as Rachel Maddow and Joe Scarborough — were blindsided by McDaniel’s hire.
This type of blunder usually costs someone a job. I don’t know how it couldn’t in this case, with one MSNBC anchor after another lambasting NBC for the hire before millions of viewers. It really was unprecedented, and it soon was clear that the decision would have to be reversed under this onslaught of justifiable indignation.
While we don’t know yet who championed the idea of hiring McDaniel, the buck has to stop with NBCUniversal News Group President Cesar Conde. Though if he’s looking for a scapegoat, there’s always NBC News senior vice president of politics Carrie Budoff Brown.
In announcing McDaniel’s hiring in an internal memo last Friday, Brown wrote, “It couldn’t be a more important moment to have a voice like Ronna’s on the team.”
That one didn’t age well.
(From Project Orange: Saving Democracy From the Trump-MAGA Cult)