NBC stands for Now Boosting the Coup

Network gives aid to democracy’s enemies by hiring Ronna McDaniel

No major television news operation is doing enough to confront right-wing extremism. At a crisis point for our democracy, they are failing us.

But some are really failing us. One of the most popular TV news networks, Fox, isn’t even journalism – it’s anti-journalism. It’s actively misleading the public.

And last week NBC went in that same direction, hiring former Republican National Committee chair and coup conspirator Ronna McDaniel as a paid commentator. Carrie Budoff Brown, who oversees NBC News’ political coverage, announced that McDaniel would provide “an insider’s perspective on national politics and the future of the Republican Party.” What’s next – hiring members of the Jan. 6 mob for “an insider’s perspective” on bludgeoning cops and defecating in the Capitol?   

Sunday on “Meet the Press,” NBC unveiled its new hire McDaniel. The show’s host, Kristen Welker, clung to what’s left of her news cred by detailing the way McDaniel pressured local election officials and organized fake electors in an attempt to steal the 2020 election. Then Welker asked: “Do you owe this country an apology?”

McDaniel deflected, of course. And Welker didn’t ask a follow-up question:

“Does NBC owe this country an apology for hiring you?”

My answer: Yes. Yes, it does. It needs to fire McDaniel and apologize.

As a news junkie and media critic, I put TV news organizations into two categories: those that I watch because I generally trust them as information sources, and those that I monitor only because I write about the news industry and have to pay attention. NBC News fell out of the generally trustworthy category last week. Its sister network, MSNBC, is in a sort of limbo. At first, reports indicated that McDaniel would appear on MSNBC as well as NBC. Then came a report that MSNBC hosts had raised a ruckus and there were “no plans” for McDaniel to appear there. Of course, plans can change. 

And just think about that for a moment: NBC apparently thinks it can get away with putting a fascist liar on NBC’s shows, but will keep her off of its more pro-democracy channel, MSNBC. Seems like a marketing decision, not a journalism decision. 

I’ll be watching a lot less of NBC. It’s a boycott of sorts, but a soft boycott, because as I said, I  have to keep track of even disreputable news outlets. But for now I’m dumping NBC as a regular part of my news diet. I don’t know what to do about MSNBC, except wait and see. The people who control both NBC and MSNBC have shown themselves to be untrustworthy.

At the same time as I put NBC in my news dungeon, I’ll be watching CNN more. I became fed up with CNN in late 2022 when the network got rid of John Harwood and Brian Stelter, apparently to make itself look friendlier to MAGA Republicans. And my negative view of CNN was reinforced by its horrendous town hall with Donald Trump last May in which it allowed Trump to lie outrageously with very little pushback. 

CNN has been better lately. I’m not saying it’s washed off the stink from recent years, but the network now is more aggressively confronting right-wing liars.

A few months ago, Kaitlan Collins deftly fact-checked Sen. Ron Johnson’s bogus claim that fake electors were a normal thing. Around the same time, Kasie Hunt confronted Robert Kennedy Jr. about his claim that no vaccine is safe and effective. “I never said that,” RFK Jr. claimed. But Hunt had the video ready, and rolled tape of him saying exactly that. More recently, Jake Tapper took down Trump aide Jason Miller’s flat-out lie that Trump “has never mocked” President Joe Biden’s stutter.

But my favorite recent example of CNN acting like a news organization came last week when CNN's Shimon Prokupecz caught up to Michele Morrow, the Republican nominee to lead North Carolina's public schools, to ask about her social media posts calling for the executions of Biden and Barack Obama. CNN’s report is well worth watching.

Prokupecz went on the road to get his story. But so much of cable news takes place in a studio. The logistics are easier for the producers that way, and it’s also easier if they don’t have to recruit and vet a lot of new guests and instead can rely on paid commentators. There are legitimate reasons to hire commentators to lend both expertise and a variety of viewpoints. But newsroom comfort is another motivation. Producers hate surprises.

The reliance on paid commentators creates a different kind of peril, however, because when the networks hire these people, they’re endorsing them. They’re telling their audience that these experts-for-hire deserve to be heard – that the audience will be better for it. In McDaniel’s case, that’s obviously untrue. 

NBC isn’t the only abuser of the commentator system, of course. CBS did something similar in 2022 with the hiring of former Trump aide Mick Mulvaney, and was similarly denounced. Now Mulvaney is a “contributor” at NewsNation, a cable news upstart that features the ethically challenged Chris Cuomo.

CNN had its own ugly experience with paid commentators during the early Trump years when it wanted to placate Republicans. The network hired right-wingers like Jeffrey Lord, who tweeted “Sieg heil”; Paris Dennard, who got fired from his university job for sexual harassment; and Rick Santorum, who stated ignorantly that “there isn’t much Native American culture in American culture.”  All three were eventually jettisoned.

I submit that NBC’s commentator hire is worse than any of those three, and damaging to the Peacock Network’s brand.

A key job for journalists is to determine the credibility of newsmakers. But how can they do that when they have no credibility of their own?