Former RNC chair Ronna McDaniel axed by NBC after intense backlash
By: MartinPengelly (the Guardian)
S E E D E D C O N T E N T
Severe criticism followed hiring as pundit of McDaniel, who headed Republican National Committee during Trump years
The former Republican National Committee chair Ronna McDaniel is on her way out of NBC less than a week after joining the network, NBC announced in a memo from NBCUniversal News Group chairman Cesar Conde.
'Pretty bad': NBC condemned by top US historian over role for Ronna McDanielRead more
Conde said he had listened to "the legitimate concerns" of many network employees. "No organization, particularly a newsroom, can succeed unless it is cohesive and aligned," he wrote. "Over the last few days, it has become clear that this appointment undermines that goal."
Conde also apologized to employees "who felt we let them down" and said he took "full responsibility" for the hiring.
McDaniel has not commented on the memo. Her appointment as a political analyst for the network had been met with an extraordinary revolt by onscreen talent at NBC News and MSNBC, the left-leaning cable network.
In a letter to staff reported by the Wall Street Journal, Budoff Brown said: "It couldn't be a more important moment to have a voice like Ronna's on the team [to provide] an insider's perspective on national politics and on the future of the Republican party."
Appearing on NBC's flagship Meet the Press show on Sunday, McDaniel said Joe Biden won the 2020 election "fair and square".
But she also claimed it was "fair to say there were problems [in elections in battleground states] in 2020" and said that while she did "not think violence should be in our political discourse", she supported Donald Trump's election fraud lie, which ultimately stoked the deadly January 6 attack on Congress , as a way of "taking one for the whole team" .
That interview prompted an angry on-air response from Chuck Todd, a former host.
Todd pointed to attacks on the press mounted by McDaniel in her seven-year spell at the head of the RNC, which coincided with Trump's presidency and his surge to the Republican nomination this year.
Todd and other critics also highlighted McDaniel's support for Trump's attempt to overturn the 2020 election, including direct involvement in her home state, Michigan, and her backing for Trump in this election cycle, even as his criminal and civil court cases proliferated and he stoked fears of authoritarian ambitions.
Despite such support, McDaniel was ejected from the RNC last month, to be replaced by Trump's daughter-in-law, Lara Trump.
A procession of senior NBC and MSNBC hosts followed Todd in protesting the McDaniel hire on air, from the popular husband-and-wife morning show team of Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski to Jen Psaki, Nicolle Wallace, Joy-Ann Reid, Lawrence O'Donnell and Rachel Maddow.
Prominent rightwingers in media and politics cried foul, pointing to Psaki's MSNBC role after being White House press secretary under Joe Biden as they alleged hypocrisy at the left-leaning network.
"But NBC hired a Republican??!!" the Texas senator Ted Cruz said. "It's the end of the world."
Todd was among those to respond, saying such claims ignored McDaniel's support for Trump's attempted election subversion.
"This is about whether honest journalists are supposed to lend their credibility to someone who intentionally tried to ruin ours," Todd said.
On Monday night, Maddow, perhaps the biggest MSNBC primetime star, delivered a long monologue, saying in part: "We are contending with something we've never had to contend with before … bad actors trying to use the rights and privileges of the democracy to end democracy.
"The chief threat among them now is not the rioters and the kooks, but the slick political professionals who are turning their considerable talents to laundering violently revolutionary claims that America's elections aren't real."
Reid said: "We welcome Republican people. I want [anti-Trump Republicans] Adam Kinzinger and Liz Cheney to come talk to me.
"This isn't a difference of opinion. [McDaniel] literally backed an illegal scheme to steal an election in the state of Michigan. It's not about partisanship. We have to be pro-democracy and that's the goal here."
Citing recent cuts in light of McDaniel's reported $300,000 deal, a union group representing rank-and-file NBC News staffers also demanded management action.
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I think NBC played Ronna McDaniel and their audience. This whole thing smells like it was a publicity stunt.
Trump says she is in Never/Never land!
The network that hired Jen psaki while she lied professionally for Biden can’t have a political hack on their stafff. lol…
stuff like this just feeds trump ammo. The networks are so preposterously up their own ass they have no idea how this pandering to the left destroys their credibility.
do you believe Trump won in 2020 ?
Do you believe Republicans want to defund the police?
Do you believe Republicans want to defund the police?
Nope-- they're just faking it!
I read a garbage article from Reason magazine along this same line. Its one of the stupidest things I have seen.
Jen Psaki didnt spend months all over national media denying an election result. Nor did Nicole Wallace or Michael Steele or any of the other people mentioned in that Reason article. They are not at all in the same boat as Ronna McDaniel
this article is ridiculous
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reason.com /2024/03/25/ronna-mcdaniel-nbc-chuck-todd-jen-psaki/
Why Are NBC Anchors Throwing a Tantrum Over Ronna McDaniel's Hiring?
Ronna McDaniel (Screenshot via NBC News)
NBC News has hired recently departed Republican National Committee (RNC) Chair Ronna McDaniel as an on-air contributor, and many of her new colleagues are fleeing for their safe spaces.
Chuck Todd, the former host of NBC's Meet the Press , appeared on his old show with host Kristen Welker over the weekend and savaged the network for hiring McDaniel after all of the "gaslighting" that occurred at the RNC during her reign. He went on to suggest that the network had put Welker—who had just interviewed McDaniel—in a horrible position.
Todd was not alone: Morning Joe co-hosts Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski were similarly outraged.
That's quite a lot of hand-wringing over a cable channel hiring a former politico to provide opinion commentary—a turn of events that is not remotely unprecedented.
Indeed, Todd's suggestion that his bosses might have transgressed journalistic norms by hiring and interviewing a political operative with potentially mixed loyalties is pretty rich considering, well, the existence of Jen Psaki. Psaki, of course, is the anchor of her own show on MSNBC, despite formerly serving as White House press secretary for President Joe Biden. There was not some massive time gap between these two positions—on the contrary, she negotiated her move to cable while still working within the administration .
Psaki was a paid CNN contributor before working for Biden, and prior to that, she 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 did not particularly find this controversial until about 5 seconds ago. Indeed, Scarborough is himself a former Republican member of Congress. Nicolle Wallace, a former communications director for President George W. Bush, also has an MSNBC show. (The network has a type, and that type is ex-Republican-turned-anti-Trump zealot.)
Then there's Symone Sanders, who jumped from the 2016 Bernie Sanders campaign to CNN and then joined the Biden campaign in 2020, became a spokesperson for Vice President Kamala Harris, and finally ended up with her own show at…MSNBC. To be clear, this practice of hiring former Washington insiders to provide commentary is standard practice within cable news; it is not remotely confined to MSNBC. Donna Brazile, who has previously served as acting chair of the Democratic National Committee, has been a paid contributor on CNN, ABC, and Fox News. Fox also employs Dana Perino, a former Bush White House spokesperson. And of course, ABC News famously hired George Stephanopoulos, a former communications director in the Bill Clinton White House, to serve as a correspondent and political analyst even though he had no previous journalism experience whatsoever.
The selective outrage over McDaniel is thus pretty rich.
What's really going on here is that mainstream media figures dislike McDaniel because of the work she did on Donald Trump's behalf. But unlike the network's cadre of Trump-hating Republican commentators, McDaniel is actually in a position to educate viewers about Trump's appeal to a significant share of the electorate. If they don't like what she's saying, other on-air personalities can challenge her. That is the whole point of cable news commentary, right?
The NBC and MSNBC personalities did not object to McDaniel because she led the RNC.
Psaki is every bit as bad and just as much a lying hack. She said whatever helped Biden at the moment regardless of truth. She defended Jim Crow 2.0 and every other ridiculous lie and conspiracy Biden pushed like Hunter Biden's laptop is "Russian disinformation."
Absolutely absurd.
And MSNBC viewers already know what Trump's appeal is.
Agree. They didn't want a different point of view on their far left wing network
Only from the far left viewpoint which has little to do with reality. They may want to go outside their bubble once in a while for the truth.
Good! Ronna Romney McDaniel is a lying sack of shit shape shifting blabber mouth for hire with no morals and is still about Half-a-MAGA...
And that is way too much!
A procession of senior NBC and MSNBC hosts followed Todd in protesting the McDaniel hire on air, from the popular husband-and-wife morning show team of Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski to Jen Psaki, Nicolle Wallace, Joy-Ann Reid, Lawrence O'Donnell and Rachel Maddow.
I was slipping channels last night and happened to see the begininng of Maddow's show-- and was intrigued. She was obviously making a case for -- something. But what? (It wasn't immediately obvious-- so I watched the whole show.
She started by saying "these 4 men are living rent-free in my head". There were headshots of Father Coughlin , Gerald L.K. Smith, and 2 others I fergot now who they were.
But all four had some things in common-- they were all racist white-supremacists, anti-Semitic hate- mongers! "Fascists". who wanted to end democracy in America.
But I was wondering where she was going with this . . .
But I was wondering where she was going with this
Well, I was surprised to see that rather than covering several current news stories-- her entire show was on one topic! Basically she was warning her viewers about the impending shift towards "fascism" and an end to democracy in the U.S. And then-- and therefore the big mistake MSNBC was making in hiring a pro-fascist like Ronna McDaniel!
(She also mentioned some of the strongly negative things other MSNBC news people said.This was her entire show!)
So its obvious that the staff as MSNBC was very , very upset about McDamiel being hired!