Late on Tuesday, March 26, NBC News stepped back from an abyss of its own manufacture, bowing to unprecedented internal pressure and rescinding an offer to Ronna McDaniel, the former chair, to join NBC News’ contributor corps, at a reported $300,000 a year.
The internal hue and cry from Joe Scarborough, Mika Brzezinski, Chuck Todd, Nicolle Wallace and Rachel Maddow, and equally powerful objections from thousands on XTwitter and other social platforms, were irresistible, and NBCUniversal News Group chairman Cesar Conde, who signed off on the McDaniel hire, found that out the hard way. Conde dutifully accepted full responsibility, even though others in the NBC brain trust gave their blessings, in what Conde, in the walkback memo, called “a collective recommendation.”
It's tempting to write the McDaniel episode off as a one-time mistake, a single lapse in judgment on behalf of a striving for balance in the runup to a brutal home stretch between the conventions and November 5th. But other on-air missteps that managed to elude viewers and TV watchers suggest that NBC News’ grasp of the power of its own medium, and its own brand, in the highly charged context of politics has been inconsistent at best.
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On Feb. 24, the network covered the South Carolina Republican Primary; it was, as expected, another campaign victory for former president Donald Trump over former South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley. With less than 20 percent of the votes in, Trump was already trouncing Haley by more than 18 percentage points. The tally was so lopsided that NBC called the contest early, declaring Trump the “projected winner.” The scene at Trump headquarters looked predictably freewheeling, and the other networks had their people doing the customary standups on the scene. NBC went in another direction.
There, apparently reporting from Trump headquarters for NBC News was none other than … Hogan Gidley, vice chair of the conservative Center for Election Integrity, former national press secretary for the Trump 2020 campaign, and former White House press secretary in the Trump administration. At least that’s how Gidley was variously identified in the captions under the images of him holding a microphone on the floor of this campaign event, just like he would have been had the caption read HOGAN GIDLEY NBC NEWS.
Except it didn’t, and it never did. Gidley was never identified as an analyst or a consultant for the network during his standup. For about five minutes, Gidley presented viewers with a largely unchallenged billboard for the issues, the platform and the mindset of the Republican party in general, and the perceived virtues of Donald Trump in particular, and Gidley did it from behind a handheld microphone, adopting the televisual persona of a reporter at the scene.
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Much ado about nothin’? Not really. Gidley’s impersonation went over pretty well. When he finished his on-air position paper, Hallie Jackson, anchor for the primary coverage, gave him a sign-off worthy of a fellow reporter: “Hogan Gidley, there for us at Trump campaign headquarters, thank you very much.” Wait, WTF? “There for us”? Since when? Where was the chyron caption announcing his relationship with NBC News? And if there wasn’t such a relationship, why didn’t someone else with NBC at the same event — say, correspondent Garrett Haake, who was there too — interview Gidley, in the process making clear the relationship, and the distinction, between journalist and political partisan?
And it wasn’t the first time or the last. NBC News did it before the polls closed that night, with Drew McKissick, state chairman of the South Carolina Republican Party, mike in hand, talking to Jackson about the campaign post-South Carolina. After Gidley was done, NBC did it again, when South Carolina Rep. William Timmons, another Trump supporter, offered the same partisan viewpoints in a reportorial context, again speaking solo on NBC’s air.
NBC’s endowment of an on-air mike to party loyalists muddled the distinctions between newsgatherer and politician, ignoring the visual signals it sends. Subliminals like that, combined with the towering unforced error on Ronna McDaniel, suggest — however unintentionally, however improbably — a news organization putting a finger in the wind … or a thumb on the scale.
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All of this will almost certainly be explained away as a logistical issue, something easily corrected by having more NBC News staffers at the watch parties or the campaign headquarters, or just interviewing fewer people in the room. As it is, though, handoffs like these just described tarnish the NBC News brand and, regrettably, make it easier to understand how the McDaniel debacle could have happened.
Visuals matter on television. The history of TV news in general, and especially its capture of political news, is crowded with the drama of unfolding events narrated and explained by a reporter at the scene, speaking with the imprimatur and the reputational gravitas of the network transmitting the reporter’s discoveries. So it’s more than a logistical matter; it means something when a network puts a microphone in someone’s hand and stands them up in a location. It says: This man, this woman … this person stands for us. This person represents us. This person really is ‘there for us.’
That may be what NBC News intends to say, that may be the message they mean to send, but these recent disconnects point to something that isn’t working. NBC News needs to rethink how it hopes to achieve the balance of political viewpoints it clearly wants, and who it chooses to help achieve that.
Full disclosure: The author was formerly an editor and reporter with msnbc.com.
