3 ways NBC flunked the Ronna McDaniel test

Ronna McDaniel, the former chair of the Republican National Committee, was hired by NBC News on Friday to be a contributor. “It couldn’t be a more important moment to have a voice like Ronna’s on the team,” said top NBC exec Carrie Budoff Brown.

Four days later, she was unceremoniously fired after making a single appearance on the network, putting an end to one of the biggest media debacles in recent memory.

Every aspect of the decision immediately went off the rails, with NBC hosts melting down hysterically over the hire. It was a failure on nearly every level that will reverberate for months, if not years.

This episode perfectly encapsulates the state of both our political landscape and the corporate media. It exposed the fraud of the so-called journalists at NBC like Chuck Todd, who was one of the first to take to the airwaves on Sunday to blast the hiring. If Ronna McDaniel, a fairly benign mainstream political lifer who happens to be a Republican, is unacceptable at NBC, what does that say for the mission of providing the audience with a diverse set of viewpoints?

Is Mike Pence unacceptable? Nikki Haley? Surely an actual current Trump supporter — like approximately half the country — would be persona non grata.

And Todd was just the tip of the iceberg. MSNBC had a day-long, on-air therapy session. Nicolle Wallace, a former GOP hack herself, lamented that McDaniel would be “one of us,” who would get to speak as a paid contributor on “our sacred airwaves.”

Jen Psaki, Biden’s literal former press secretary and now a cable news network host, contrasted her own past political experience with McDaniel’s, claiming that hers was “paired with honesty and good faith.” Rachel Maddow devoted more than half her show during her one-hour-per-week gig to this very important topic, hyperbolizing the gravity of the situation by claiming McDaniel is “part of an ongoing project to get rid of our system of government.”

That a news network paying a few hundred-thousand dollars to a talking head to occasionally give opinions on-air would cause the entire journalistic operation to throw an extended, exaggerated temper tantrum sums up legacy media. It was already embarrassing on its own. But then the bosses at NBC gave in to this uprising — not just against themselves, but against basic principles of journalism.

As with the New York Times’s Tom Cotton op-ed debacle, when the “paper of record” pushed out its opinion editor after a public pressure campaign from lower-level employees, this incident will embolden self-styled resistance warriors who have infiltrated the industry to continue their tactics in the future. Fire McDaniel, and you appease the mob today, but you will only empower it tomorrow.

But there’s another, even more pernicious failing that relates to the reported bidding war among the establishment media elite in the first place. These people may understand instinctively that they have blind spots when it comes to half the entire country’s population, but they have no idea what sort of hire would actually resonate with the conservatives they are theoretically trying to reach.

Did anyone stop to consider why McDaniel is on the market for a contributor gig in the first place? Her track record leading an organization saw disappointing results in 2018, 2020 and 2022. Her conflicts with the more closely Trump-aligned groups such as Turning Point USA caused her to out of favor with the MAGA movement long ago. She was finally pushed out of the RNC after yet another disappointing fundraising round. She is, of course, a Romney — despite having dropped the name at Trump’s urging.

I’m sure she’s very nice and smart. But did NBC think they were getting some great communicator about what’s driving the direction of the right today? She’s like the ChatGPT of the Grand Old Party, trained on the Romney model, despite the insistence from NBC’s entire staff that she’s some kind of insurrectionist-enabling “election denier.” The Trumpian phoenix built in the ashes of her RNC the minute she left should tell everyone all they need to know about her MAGA-adjacency. And a poll last year found just 6 percent of Republicans wanted her elected for another term, with 73 percent saying someone else should lead the RNC.

Maybe the only thing less popular with Republicans than McDaniel is NBC itself. Yes, America’s trust in the media is at all-time lows — and not just with the right, but with independents too. After this fiasco, it’s only going to get worse. In that light, maybe the pushback from within was some professional jealousy.

NBC’s journalists and hosts couldn’t process sharing a break room with a prominent and actual Republican. Fail one. The bosses gave in to their childish employees, who clearly don’t understand the role of a journalist. Fail two. And the entire news outlet apparently thought McDaniel was a GOP voice that would resonate with conservatives in America to begin with. Fail three.

Just a total resounding flunking by NBC.

“No organization, particularly a newsroom, can succeed unless it is cohesive and aligned,” said NBCU head Cesar Conde in his announcement Tuesday about McDaniel’s dismissal.

The only cohesion and alignment right now at NBC News is how collectively isolated it is from the average American, hopelessly stuck in its Acela media bubble.

Steve Krakauer, a NewsNation contributor, is the author of “Uncovered: How the Media Got Cozy with Power, Abandoned Its Principles, and Lost the People” and editor and host of the Fourth Watch newsletter and podcast.