By Becket Adams
Sunday, March 31, 2024
Once you understand that the legacy press is
essentially a high-school cafeteria with strict clique enforcement, the things
that upset corporate journalists make a lot more sense.
The “outrages” rarely, if ever, concern journalistic
integrity and are usually mere violations of tribal purity.
Case in point: the dust-up at NBC News this month over
the hiring and abrupt firing of former Republican National Committee chairwoman
Ronna McDaniel.
NBC News announced on March 22 that it had hired McDaniel
as an on-air contributor two weeks after she stepped down at the RNC. In
response, NBC staff, including Chuck Todd, Rachel Maddow, and Nicolle Wallace,
revolted, claiming that McDaniel’s hiring severely threatened the network’s
journalistic credibility.
On Meet the Press, Todd, formerly the show’s
anchor, appeared on a panel hosted by his successor, Kristen Welker, following
her on-air interview with McDaniel. “I think our bosses owe you an apology for
putting you in this situation,” he said solemnly to Welker.
He added, “There’s a reason why there’s a lot of
journalists at NBC News uncomfortable with this because many of our
professional dealings with the RNC over the last six years have been met with
gaslighting, have been met with character assassination.”
On her show on MSNBC, Maddow caustically reproached her
network: “The fact that Ms. McDaniel is on the payroll at NBC News, to me, that
is inexplicable. You wouldn’t — you wouldn’t — you wouldn’t hire, like, a wise
guy. You wouldn’t hire a made man, like a mobster, to work at a DA’s office,
right? You wouldn’t hire a pickpocket to work as a TSA screener.”
In Wallace’s view, what NBC’s hiring of McDaniel said to
“election deniers is not just that they can do that on our airwaves, but that
they can do that as one of us, as badge-carrying employees of NBC News, as paid
contributors to our sacred airwaves.”
“Sacred airwaves”? Do these people even hear themselves?
By March 26, the staff revolt had achieved its goal. NBC
News severed ties with McDaniel.
“After listening to the legitimate concerns of many of
you, I have decided that Ronna McDaniel will not be an NBC News contributor,”
NBC News Group chairman Cesar Conde said in a memo to staff. “No organization,
particularly a newsroom, can succeed unless it is cohesive and aligned. Over
the last few days, it has become clear that this appointment undermines that
goal.”
The absurdity of a completely “aligned” newsroom aside,
the real laugh line here is the risible idea that NBC staffers were concerned
solely about the network’s journalistic credibility.
The revolt was never about integrity. It was only ever
about personal animus. Or, put more simply, they plain don’t like McDaniel (or
anyone in Trump’s orbit, for that matter). The revolt was no deeper than a
clique saying to an outsider, You can’t sit at our table!
Now, McDaniel is a political creature, a gutless
mercenary who will do as she’s told, including dropping the “Romney” from her name after Trump
apparently suggested it. Her hiring by NBC was an
embarrassment. A good journalist should be ashamed to share
airtime with her. The politics-to-media revolving door shouldn’t exist, and NBC
shouldn’t have hired McDaniel in the first place.
The issue here is that McDaniel would hardly have been
the worst of NBC’s problems. Credibility? What credibility? For the employees
of NBC, of all news organizations, to raise a stink over the impropriety of
the McDaniel hire is laughable. It’s a bit like Tom Green tsk-tsking that
those Jackass boys are too undignified. Are NBC staffers
completely unaware of what goes on at their own network?
Where was their righteous indignation when NBC announced
it had hired former CIA director John Brennan as a contributor?
Brennan is not just any former CIA director. He’s the one
who was caught turning his agents loose on the U.S. Senate after lawmakers
started looking into the CIA’s torture methods. Brennan was caught not just
spying on the Senate; he was also caught lying about said spying on the Senate.
Oh, also, Brennan is one of the chief architects of the drone-warfare program.
Brennan is a professional liar. Yet there have been no internal revolts at 30
Rock because he draws a paycheck from NBC.
NBC also gave a show to former Biden press secretary Jen
Psaki. The network even negotiated her contract while she was still an
employee of the White House. Psaki has no serious journalism or news
background apart from finding creative ways to undercut and lie to reporters.
But she has a show!
Most damning of all, NBC at one point paid Chelsea
Clinton $600,000 annually for a made-up gig, evidently because the network’s
executives thought her mother would one day be president.
There were no on-air meltdowns for Brennan’s hiring,
Chelsea Clinton’s six-figure “salary,” or the White House press secretary’s
negotiating an NBC contract while still briefing reporters — including those
employed by NBC — from the podium of the White House press room.
This is to say nothing of the fact that NBC gave a show
to Nicolle Wallace, known best for trading McCain campaign secrets. NBC gave a
show to former congressman Joe Scarborough, who is definitionally partisan.
Former RNC chairman Michael Steele, a partisan, is a weekend host. Obama
election guru David Axelrod was a senior political analyst at NBC until 2015
(he jumped ship for CNN). NBC even gave Al Sharpton, who once incited
antisemitic riots in Crown Heights, a weekend show on MSNBC.
Yet this past weekend, we were treated to multiple
sermons about NBC’s sacred airwaves. McDaniel, you see, is different. She
isn’t just a simple beneficiary of the politics-to-media revolving door, the
sermonizers said. No, the difference here is that McDaniel, like many GOP
lieutenants, played along with former president Donald Trump’s 2020 election
trutherism.
Fair enough. But again, this complaint would be more
compelling if it came from basically any other network. NBC is the home for not
just 2016 election conspiracy theories (the Russians robbed Hillary!) but also 2000 election
trutherism. It’s true: There are still 2000 holdouts who think Al Gore was
robbed, some of whom anchor MSNBC programs (see: Joy
Reid).
The McDaniel affair last week is reminiscent of when CNN
hired former Justice Department spokeswoman Sarah Isgur in 2019 as a politics editor. Journalists
everywhere complained all at once, screaming that she was too political and
inexperienced for such a job. CNN scrambled, moving Isgur into a
political-analyst role.
Never mind that George Stephanopoulos’s only media
experience before ABC News was when he did some light sports broadcasting in
college. In between college and ABC, Stephanopoulos worked for two Democratic
congressmen and then served on the Dukakis ’88 presidential campaign before
eventually landing a lead role in the Clinton White House. And never mind that
before the late Tim Russert anchored Meet the Press, his résumé
consisted of serving in Democratic senator Daniel Moynihan’s office and later
as an aide to Democratic New York governor Mario Cuomo. No outcry was heard
over their political ties or collective lack of journalism experience.
No, the hiring of Isgur, who departed CNN in 2020 for
greener pastures, was an outrage. She served at the Justice
Department under Trump! To offer her a job straight out of the DOJ was an
insult to all that is good and holy about journalism!
The revolving door between media and journalism is real.
It shouldn’t be, but it is. NBC is one of the worst offenders. Its staffers
have rarely, if ever, said boo about it. Yet we’re supposed to believe now that
their objections to McDaniel were genuine and rooted in a deep sense of
professionalism? Come on.
Like the New York Times’ Tom Cotton op-ed
debacle, this entire McDaniel affair has been highly instructive in terms of
understanding what animates corporate journalists.
Hint: It’s not their credibility.
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