We’ve filled three blog posts with the Media Research Center’s grumbling about NBC talent revolting over the channel hiring (and then firing) noted liar and former Republican National Committee chair Ronna McDaniel as a commentator — and there’s still more. Tim Graham went on Newsmax on March 26 to carp about the situation, summarizing it in a tweet: “On The Chris Salcedo show, we talked about the Ronna McDaniel debacle at NBC/MSNBC. They don’t want an authentic, oppositional Republican on their channels. Wouldn’t it be nice to have someone drive Rachel Maddow into a tizzy? She’s comparing Ronna to a mobster, a real tizzy.” This, of course, took place during a segment in which an authentic oppositional Democrat did not part — presumably on Graham’s orders and Newsmax’s acquiescence.
Alex Christy complained that a NBC personality continued to talk about the McDaniel situation in an April 3 post:
NBC’s Today anchor Savannah Guthrie traveled to CBS and The Late Show with Stephen Colbert on Tuesday to promote her new book, but before that, Colbert couldn’t help but ask about Ronna McDaniel-gate. Guthrie claimed that the NBC brass “acknowledged a mistake” in hiring the former RNC chairwoman because “there’s a line and the line is truth.”
A half-sincere, half-joking Colbert asked, “Well, one of the big stories about NBC and about NBC News recently was the hiring of and firing of Ronna McDaniel, who used to be head of the RNC, and so my question for you is why did you, Savannah Guthrie, personally make that decision to hire her? I want you to answer for your crimes. Why did you think that was the best idea?”
[…]Paying lip service to the idea that outlets like NBC should have a variety of voices, Guthrie continued, “But look, I think the instinct to try to have a diversity of opinions and a diversity of perspectives and voices as we cover an election is the right instinct, and it’s complex, and it’s made more complex by the politics that we have right now, but, you know, I went to law school. In law school, we learned that if you didn’t engage the counterargument, if you didn’t know what all sides were saying, your own position was quite weak.”
However, she was still glad to see that McDaniel was eventually let go, “So, I feel that particularly in mainstream media, we need to include an array of voices. But there’s a line, and the line is truth. The line is facts and the line is you have to be someone upholding our democracy and that’s to me where the line is.”
Christy then resorted to whataboutism instead of forthrightly admitting that McDaniel spread false information and was an election denier:
That would be more credible if NBC/MSNBC followed up by hiring at least one consistent conservative voice or didn’t spread false information on a regular basis, if the media didn’t routinely freak out about conservative hires, or didn’t play nice with Democratic election deniers. The Late Show, meanwhile, never has any conservative voices unless Colbert ends up getting more than he bargained for when speaking to Liz Cheney.
We don’t recall Christy ever complaining about the lack of liberal voices on Fox News. Meanwhile, MRC chief Brent Bozell served up his own whataboutism during a softball interview with right-wing ranter Mark Levin:
Bozell said NBC fired Ronna McDaniel a few days after they hired her because she was an “election denier,” after they denied that Hillary Clinton lost in 2016 for years, with their empty charges that Trump colluded with the Russian government to steal the election.
Actually, as the Mueller report demonstrated, those charges were far from “empty” — it showed that the Trump campaign met dozens of times with Republican operatives and that then-campaign manager Paul Manafort shared internal polling info with another Republican operative, and other investigations concurred.