In Unhiring Ronna McDaniel, NBC Made the Right Move for the Wrong Reason

Julie Hollar

NBC created a stir when it announced on Friday that it had hired former RNC chair Ronna McDaniel to be a paid on-air contributor. After three days of vocal pushback from star employees across the company's outlets, the company heeded the criticism and let McDaniel go. While it's a positive course correction, the tale as a whole is an inauspicious sign for how corporate media will deal with Donald Trump as the pivotal 2024 presidential election nears.

McDaniel, hand-picked by Trump to lead the RNC after his 2016 election, and ousted at his behest earlier this month (AP, 2/13/24), supported Trump's false 2020 election claims and frequently attacked the legitimacy of the press corps, including NBC and MSNBC journalists (CNN, 3/22/24).

MSNBC host Rachel Maddow (Rolling Stone (3/26/24) criticized her employers for "putting on the payroll someone who hasn’t just attacked us as journalists, but someone who is part of an ongoing project to get rid of our system of government."

Those kinds of anti-democracy, anti-journalism positions apparently didn't strike NBC leadership as any sort of obstacle to their own mission. “It couldn’t be a more important moment to have a voice like Ronna’s on the team,” explained NBC News senior VP Carrie Budoff Brown in an internal memo announcing the hiring (Fast Company, 3/27/24), touting McDaniel's "insider’s perspective on national politics and on the future of the Republican Party" (Washington Post, 3/23/24).

McDaniel made her first appearance as a paid contributor in an interview on NBC's Meet the Press (3/24/24) that had been booked before her hiring. Host Kristen Welker pressed McDaniel repeatedly on her past false claims, asking, "Why should people trust what you're saying right now?" Subsequent shows on both NBC and MSNBC featured top anchors eviscerating their bosses' hire, an unusual sight on corporate news.

By Tuesday night, NBC announced its reversal. “No organization, particularly a newsroom, can succeed unless it is cohesive and aligned,” wrote NBCUniversal chair Cesar Conde (Rolling Stone, 3/26/24). “Over the last few days, it has become clear that this appointment undermines that goal.”

False principle of 'balance'

It's heartening that the pushback from NBC journalists forced management's reversal, but it's shameful that the network made the hiring decision in the first place. And Conde's mea culpa suggested the company's decision was fundamentally about quelling a workplace rebellion rather than recognizing a baseline journalistic standard of not rewarding liars with airtime.

Politico (3/25/24) reported that NBC executives liked McDaniel since she helped them "land a Republican presidential debate, a high priority at the network," because "CNN had beat NBC in the race to host a Trump town hall."

That shouldn't be a surprise, because the primary standard corporate outlets adhere to is the one they see as boosting their bottom line: the false principle of "balance," whereby outlets platform voices from "both sides" in order to claim freedom from bias, no matter how extreme or unreliable one side in particular might be.

It's a principle that was likewise on display in mainstream coverage of the brouhaha. Politico's Ryan Lizza (3/25/24), for instance, wrote:

The on-air protests represent what could be a seminal moment in political media as news organizations continue to grapple with how to responsibly represent voices from the Trump right on their screens and in their pages without handing their platforms over to election deniers or bad faith actors who have attacked and attempted to discredit their own reporters.

Of course, what Politico presents as a legitimate dilemma that news outlets might conceivably overcome is in fact an impossibility, given that Trumpism is founded on the rejection of truth and honesty—something many in corporate media at least began to acknowledge after Trump's failed January 6 insurrection (FAIR.org, 1/18/21).

But that was then; as Trump creeps back closer to power, corporate media are likewise slinking back to hedging their bets and prioritizing false balance over actual journalism.

Twisted picture

Republican strategist Alex Conant (Washington Post, 3/26/24) explained that networks face a "challenging pundit-supply issue": "They have tried to find serious people coming out of Trumpworld and have not found a lot of appetite.”

The Washington Post (3/26/24) painted a similarly twisted picture:

The outrage over [McDaniel's] 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.

As did the New York Times (3/26/24):

The episode underscored the deeply partisan sphere in which news organizations are trying to operate — and the challenge of fairly representing conservative and pro-Trump viewpoints in their coverage, if major Republican Party figures like Ms. McDaniel are deemed unacceptable by viewers or colleagues.

The nation's top newspapers would have readers believe that media outlets are trying to offer true journalism, but are thwarted by their "audience" and some less-enlightened members of the press corps, who would prefer to see things through a partisan lens. In fact, the way to "fairly represent" the views of a movement centered around denying the results of elections is to debunk them—not amplify them.

Not a difference of opinion

NBC has made several hires from the far right since the rise of Trump. Shortly after the 2016 election, the network brought on former Fox star Megyn Kelly (FAIR.org, 6/16/17). It added former Bush communications director Nicolle Wallace in 2017, former Fox anchor Shepard Smith in 2020, and former Mike Pence aide Marc Short just a month ago (Variety, 2/27/24).

Trump alum Mick Mulvaney had a "history of bashing the press and promoting the former president’s fact-free claims" (Washington Post, 3/30/22), but CBS said he was "helping us in terms of access to that side of the equation.”

In perhaps the most notorious example, CBS hired former Trump aide Mick Mulvaney in 2022. CBS co-president Neeraj Khemlani explained in a leaked recording (Washington Post, 3/30/22) that "getting access" to Republican elites was crucial, "because we know the Republicans are going to take over, most likely, in the midterms." That decision also faced backlash, though it didn't prompt CBS to make the quick about-face NBC did. Still, Mulvaney made only infrequent appearances on the network, and was out within a year.

But none of these went quite so far as NBC's McDaniel's hire, since none of those hires supported Trump's fraudulent 2020 election claims.

And the outspoken NBC and MSNBC journalists who stood up to their bosses made clear that their beef was not with McDaniel's partisan affiliation. Morning Joe co-host Mika Brzezinski (3/25/24) said:

To be clear, we believe NBC News should seek out conservative Republican voices to provide balance in their election coverage. But it should be conservative Republicans, not a person who used her position of power to be an anti-democracy election denier.

Anchor Joy Reid (ReidOut, 3/25/24) agreed: “We welcome Republican voices. The reality is: This isn’t a difference of opinion. She literally backed an illegal scheme to steal an election in the state of Michigan.”

So perhaps we have discovered a line that some corporate journalists, at least, are unwilling to cross—even if their bosses have less compunction. It suggests that far more journalists are going to have to stand up to those bosses regarding election coverage decisions if we hope to see anything like the kind of journalism we need to defend what little democracy we have left.

Research assistance: Xenia Gonikberg