The abrupt firing of former Republican Party Chairwoman Ronna McDaniel from her brand-new paid contributor gig at NBC News is one of the most instructive episodes of the ideological conformity that plagues the legacy media.
McDaniel, far from among the most controversial voices in the Republican Party, signed a two-year contract with NBC last week that would pay her $300,000 per year to appear on the network and its affiliates. The hiring prompted an outcry from the ideological monolith that is MSNBC, as on-air hosts used their platforms to bash the network for hiring McDaniel.
In a statement announcing the network was dropping McDaniel as fast as it had hired her, NBCUniversal News Group Chairman Cesar Conde said that “no organization, particularly a newsroom, can succeed unless it is cohesive and aligned.”
For a newsroom that is supposed to inform voters from across the aisle, the message from Conde to viewers and readers is one of exclusion. The newsroom of NBC News so lacks ideological diversity that the mere prospect of a conservative voice on the network or its affiliates is so offensive that it threatens the company’s ability to function.
Chuck Todd is not a journalist, Mika Brzezinski and Joe Scarborough are not honest anchors, and Rachel Maddow is not a thoughtful and insightful commentator. They are regime propagandists who do the bidding of an oligarchic corporate class that has created a revolving door between government and corporate media with the goal of furthering the interest of both. All one has to do is look at who the personalities are that NBC has seen fit to hire and charged with filling airtime.
Symone Sanders expertly peddled disinformation on behalf of Vice President Kamala Harris for a year before decamping to a golden parachute provided by MSNBC, which gave her a weekend show to parrot Biden administration and Democratic Party talking points. Jen Psaki served as the White House press secretary for the first year and a half of the Biden administration, effortlessly spinning the administration’s failures to the world press before she, too, took a cushy job at the regime propaganda network and now hosts a show of her own.
While having a slanted network agenda is not at all unusual, the hostility to Republican voices and clear favoritism toward Democrats and “ex-Republicans” like Liz Cheney and Michael Steele is. Even Fox News has a long list of Democratic Party operatives who are paid contributors for the network. For NBC and MSNBC, Republican voices can only come on the air if their opinions are approved by the network’s neoliberal brain trust. McDaniel’s voice, however milquetoast for a Republican it may be, was seen as a threat to the permitted order.
The most welcome development of McDaniel’s ouster is the potential it has to harm NBC’s ability to report on Republicans. In their rush to silence McDaniel and mainstream Republican voices on the network, the hosts who publicly trashed their bosses on-air made the lives of their not-so-famous colleagues much more difficult.
According to Semafor, political reporters who do not have on-air shows and produce most of the news content that NBC puts out are concerned that NBC’s defenestration of McDaniel has severely harmed their relationships with Republican sources.
“Four NBC News staffers expressed concern that instead of fixing the problem, hiring and then firing McDaniel had only alienated liberal viewers while confirming Republican fears,” the outlet reported.
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Why any Republican aide or staffer is feeding information to NBC is a question in itself. But if McDaniel’s firing leads to a realization that legacy media do not deserve information from conservatives, that should at least be considered a small win.
Nevertheless, the viewers of NBC and its affiliates will be poorly served by the company’s unwillingness to speak to dissenting voices. And that is a great tragedy that will not be corrected anytime soon.