As the NBC-Ronna McDaniel drama continued, the Media Research Center continued to obsess over it. Tim Graham ranted about it in his March 27 column:
The word broke on March 26 that NBC News was reversing its decision to hire former Republican Party chair Ronna McDaniel as a political commentator. MSNBC hosts across the schedule broke out into frenzied denunciations of whichever executive who thought that McDaniel should be paid to speak anywhere on this hypnotically/robotically anti-Trump network.
In one of her typical half-hour jeremiads, Rachel Maddow compared McDaniel to a mobster and a pickpocket. “You wouldn’t — you wouldn’t hire a wiseguy, 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. And so I find the decision to put her on the payroll inexplicable. And I hope they will reverse their decision.”
There was no need for NBC News to hire McDaniel. One can look at the election results during her tenure at the RNC and question her expertise at winning elections. But this mobster talk underlines once again that MSNBC is not a “news” channel. It’s a hyperbole channel, constantly fearmongering its audience that the end times are near for democracy.
Maddow claimed this hiring wasn’t about Republicans vs. Democrats. It’s about “bad actors trying to use the rights and privileges of democracy to end democracy.” There are no “fact checkers” who will get in the way of this talk. Maddow is like Bluto in Animal House saying “when the Germans invaded Pearl Harbor.” Facts don’t matter. Rallying your audience is all that matters.
Graham was silent about McDaniels’ lack of credibility with the non-right-wing media, given how she repeatedly attacked it from her perch as the head of the Republican National Committee. Graham’s gushing over McDaniels’ “expertise at winning elections” was odd, given that 1) she was not hired by NBC to win elections and 2) the MRC still hasn’t completely accepted that Republicans underperformed during the 2022 midterms, which happened while McDaniel was RNC chair. Instead, he spent the rest of his column making whataboutism attacks on Maddow.
(Also, he’ll never admit that Fox News is a “hypnotically/robotically” anti-Biden channel. Still, he appeared on Newsmax to opine about this further.)
On March 28, the MRC sent a writer to Fox News to opine on the story in a way that would never face questions from the channel’s right-wing hosts:
MRC’s Contributing Writer Stephanie Hamill was a guest on Wednesday’s Fox News at Night with host Trace Gallagher, and KTTH Seattle Radio talk show host Jason Rantz to react to NBC’s firing of former RNC Chair Ronna McDaniel.
McDaniel was hired by NBCUniversal just a couple weeks after stepping down at the Republican National Committee, and was apparently let go just after only one TV appearance on the network which lead to public tantrums on their own airwaves by some of the top hosts.
No mention, of course, of the nightly tantrums by Fox News’ hosts.
Larry Elder did slip in some inconvenient facts about McDaniel amid his NBC-bashing in his March 28 column that no other MRC writer mentioned:
The better question is why McDaniel accepted the offer. While Trump wanted her out, she cheered him on during his presidency, supported Trump’s claim of 2020 election fraud and characterized what happened on Jan. 6 as “legitimate political discourse.” How will that sit with an MSNBC lineup that routinely compares Trump to Hitler and deems Trump an existential threat to the republic?
A week after the controversy started, the MRC was still complaining it was being talked about. Alex Christy grumbled in a March 30 post:
New York Times columnist David Brooks and Washington Post associate editor and MSNBC host Jonathan Capehart came together on Friday’s PBS NewsHour to lament NBC’s “gigantic mistake” of hiring former RNC chairwoman Ronna McDaniel, whom they promptly fired after backlash from Capehart and his colleagues.
Host William Brangham set the stage by asking Brooks, “there was a revolt amongst many NBC anchors, who said, we can’t have someone who actively tried to undo the last election be on our payroll and be on our airwaves. How do you — what do you — what do you make of how that played out?”
Brooks began, “I was glad they had the instinct to get more Trump-supporting people on the air. I think that’s something we all need to work on.”
However, things then went off the rails, “But here was someone clearly over the line. Like, to be on our air and our newspapers, you got to have some intellectual credibility. You have to have some primary commitment to the truth and the truth above partisanship and she was someone who clearly fails that test. I’m so old-fashioned that our founder here, Jim Lehrer, didn’t vote. Like, he just thought, journalists, we don’t do that.”
How about the intellectual credibility of portraying yourself as the conservative half of Brooks and Capehart while routinely siding with him?
Christy injected even more whataboutism: “Jen Psaki came directly from the White House to be Capehart’s colleague at MSNBC, but Brangham didn’t ask either man about that.” Christy offered no evidence that Psaki has the same credibility issues as McDaniel.
Jeffrey Lord served up his own brand of whataboutism in his March 30 column:
The MSNBC episode is particularly hilarious. They decried McDaniel because she was a supposed “election denier” about some of the results in 2020.
Yet these are the self-same people who spent endless hours as themselves “election deniers” of the 2016 results. They spent the Trump years repeatedly declaiming that there had been a Trump-Russia collusion that stole the 2016 election and that Trump was, in Hillary Clinton’s words, an “illegitimate president.”
[…]Raising the obvious question: If Ronna McDaniel had to be fired for being an “election denier” – why not Scarborough, Maddow and Todd? Election deniers one and all – and for years. They would answer with January 6. It didn’t matter that McDaniel denounced the rioting.
Lord didn’t mention that there were arguably some legitimacy issues, given that Clinton decisively won the popular vote but lost the Electoral College — and he missed that Elder pointed out that McDaniel insisted the riot was “legitimate political discourse.” He concluded by huffing: “In short, whether it’s The New York Times or MSNBC and doubtless other supposedly “mainstream media” outlets they aren’t about journalism at all. They are, as noted, nothing more or less than far left-wing activists. And ohhh so precious. Not to mention it looks authoritarian.” Lord might want to ask why there isn’t parity between partisan analysts at Fox News and other right-wing channels.