NBC Hires Ronna McDaniel, And The Media Club Is Up To No Good Again
You Can't Sit With Us
Back in 2017, NBC News won the bidding war to hire Fox News propagandist and police brutality apologist Megyn Kelly, giving her a reported $69 million contract. Kelly became a part of the NBC News ecosystem with “Sunday Night with Megyn Kelly” and “Megyn Kelly Today,” which was a part of the Today Show juggernaut. It was a spectacular failure.
Kelly posed for goofy photos with 9/11 and Sandy Hook conspiracy theorist Alex Jones, and then went on to defend wearing racist blackface costumes during Halloween. NBC’s decision to hire Kelly also squeezed out rising star Tamron Hall, who left the network and launched her own syndicated daytime talk show.
NBC soon dropped Kelly and had to eat the contract they had given to her. The decision was a costly disaster for NBC that many of us could see coming from a million miles away. Kelly is a toxic media personality with bigoted right-wing views and her little performative fight with Donald Trump during the 2016 campaign was an outlier to her career. NBC made the call anyway.
One little noticed factoid from this era that I like to point out is that at the time they hired Kelly, paying millions for a right-wing media personality, NBC News did not have a news bureau in Puerto Rico. They did not open a bureau in the U.S. territory until 2017, following the devastation of Hurricane Maria.
It is in that context that I think about NBC’s decision to hire former RNC chair Ronna McDaniel.
McDaniel is an election denier. At the RNC she presided over an organization that worked overtime to disqualify the votes of Black citizens. The RNC under McDaniel repeatedly promoted lies and disinformation about a wide range of topics. Under McDaniel the RNC attacked journalists for reporting basic, nonpartisan facts.
Like the hiring of Megyn Kelly by the same organization, none of this gave NBC News any pause. They don’t actually care about integrity or journalistic ethics and that has been the case for a long time.
NBC isn’t alone in this by a long stretch. In 2015 and 2016, CNN hired a slew of Trump staffers and hangers-on, from Corey Lewandowski (accused of assault and on Trump’s payroll while at the network), to lynching apologist Jeffrey Lord. In 2021, both CNN and ABC News hired former Trump White House staffer Alyssa Farah, despite her record of lying for the administration and her work at her father Joseph Farah’s outlet World Net Daily writing birther conspiracy columns about President Barack Obama.
And there’s more.
What this pattern of behavior shows is the existence of what I call the “club.” What that ultimately means in our society is a class of people in the press and in politics who consider themselves to collectively be above and beyond all criticism. The people in the club freely associate with each other, jointly attending events like the White House Correspondent’s Association dinner and other D.C.-centric events, and you are not on the guest list.
Like a country club of yore that excluded Blacks, Latinos, Jews, and usually women, you’re not supposed to speak ill of the club, and certainly club members rarely offer up public criticism. If anything, the club is more likely to circle the wagons, with figures like Jake Tapper (then at ABC News) rushing to defend Fox News against Obama White House criticism. It is just not done.
Hiring Ronna McDaniel is perfectly in line with club operation, just like the decision to hire Megyn Kelly was. They don’t care how bad it makes them look to any objective observer. They hired one of their friends, they like Ronna, they believe that her lies and deceptions are merely a part of the game and that liberals are being scolds to point out the effect this has on the public and the public discourse.
The media club would like you to please shut up and stop ruining everything by holding them to some sort of standards. You’re not in the club, you couldn’t possibly understand. Right?
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— Oliver
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I need to get something off my chest.
You are 100% correct and very insightful except for not appreciating that love on your chest. If I were you I would rub and stroke it, especially behind the ears.
Club motto: Nothing is too shameless.