Today more details have emerged about the process undertaken by NBC News to make the disastrous decision to hire the traitor Ronna McDaniel as a paid contributor, and if anything these details are stirring up more outrage inside and outside of NBC News — and showing even more so how clueless and out of touch the current leaders of NBC News and NBC Universal News Group are. Raw Story has a good summary of what we’re learning, and it ain’t pretty. Among the new revelations:
- Bringing McDaniel to NBC News had been part of a nearly two-month-long effort that was spearheaded by Carrie Budoff Brown, Senior VP, Politics and her boss, NBC News President Rebecca Blumenstein, with buy-in from Cesar Conde, head of NBC News Universal Group, and his deputies at both NBC News and MSNBC, per reporting at Puck, which has dubbed this fiasco “Ronnaghazi.”
- Rashida Jones, President of MSNBC, was very interested in having McDaniel appear as a contributor on her network, according to Puck. In fact, the Washington Post reports that McDaniel got a more lucrative contract after she agreed to appear on MSNBC and not just NBC News.
- Lester Holt even got involved in this mess. Per WaPo: “McDaniel’s relationship with top NBC executives began last fall, according to people familiar with what took place. NBC was determined to secure a Republican primary debate, repeatedly talking to RNC officials about their chances and even sending star anchor Lester Holt to Washington for a pitch meeting at RNC headquarters.”
- After Chuck Todd blasted the decision to hire McDaniel on Sunday’s Meet the Press, Budoff Brown reached out to McDaniel’s aide and former chief of staff at the RNC, Richard Walters, to see if there were any friends or colleagues who could speak up on her behalf. Walters later assured Budoff Brown that they’d been able to advance conservative pushback on social media against Todd, specifically, and that this might give NBC News some cover, for which Budoff Brown thanked him. CNN reports that "staffers inside NBC News are enraged at the fact an executive would have engaged in such behavior."
- "It’s like the hunger games at @NBCNews. Every day new, horrible stories of journalism & corporate malpractice. Every single one of these managers must go," according to Jennifer Schulze, a media critic who was a Chicago Sun-Times executive producer, WGN news director, and adjunct college professor of journalism. "The @NBCNews managers who recruited & signed an election denier should be out the door, too," she adds. "Not only was it downright offensive to hire Ronna, it was journalism AND corporate malpractice."
Others have also called for the firing of Brown, Blumenstein and Conde, including former Chicago Tribune editor Mark Jacobs
There are plenty of other harsh criticisms coming in from other observers that I think are spot-on in identifying what was so troubling about this Ronna fiasco at NBC News and why it does not give much hope for the legacy news organizations being able to step up in new and more courageous ways to cover a presidential election that will no doubt be the most consequential election in our lifetimes. Here are a few choice quotes from the Raw Story piece:
- Former Obama senior advisor Dan Pfeiffer calls McDaniel's hiring "evidence" the media has "yet to accept the reality that this is not a normal election between a Republican and a Democrat." And adds, "An [industry] that prizes objectivity above all else, is incapable of accurately covering an election where one candidate is a normal politician and the other is an insurrectionist. Many in the media would rather stumble into autocracy than take a side."
- Veteran journalist and Sirius XM host Michelangelo Signorile observes, "We couldn’t have asked for a better situation to shine a bright light on the corruption of the corporate media—and its impulse to legitimize MAGA extremism and lawbreakers for profit—than NBC’s hiring former RNC chair, election denier, and Trump enabler Ronna McDaniel."
I can’t add much more to that.