What Was NBC Even Thinking?

An old journalism axiom says that if everyone’s mad at you, you must be doing something right. Since NBC announced that it had hired Ronna McDaniel, the recently deposed chair of the Republican National Committee, as a paid contributor, everyone’s been mad. NBC executives are sure to be consoling themselves that they’re doing something right. It’s just hard to see what.

On Sunday, Meet the Press host Kristen Welker rightly raked McDaniel over her past election denialism. Chuck Todd, Welker’s predecessor at MTP, then said the network’s bosses owed her an apology for placing her in a tough position—he said he didn’t know whether to take McDaniel’s answers as honest. “There’s a reason why there are a lot of journalists at NBC News uncomfortable with this, because many of our professional dealings with the RNC over the last six years have been met with gaslighting, have been met with character assassination,” Todd said on air.

[David A. Graham: Republicans are no longer a political party]

Then, on Morning Joe today, the titular Scarborough said, “We weren’t asked our opinion of the hiring, but if we were, we would have strongly objected to it for several reasons.” Co-host Mika Brzezinski said she hoped NBC would reconsider.

If NBC on-air personalities were the only ones who were upset, that wouldn’t mean the McDaniel hire was bad per se—it might even be a nice demonstration of editorial courage. She’s hardly the first political hack to get a TV gig—just ask MSNBC host Jen Psaki, a former White House press secretary, or ABC’s George Stephanopoulos, a former White House communications director. Seeing such tsuris over a Republican hire, even as former Democrats pepper TV sets, has a whiff of hypocrisy—though, as Todd points out, the blood between the Trump GOP and journalists has been much worse than the normal partisan jostling.

The problem is that McDaniel has no apparent value to viewers or the network. When outlets hire figures like her, they typically say that these people add perspective and insight that only insiders can provide. “It couldn’t be a more important moment to have a voice like Ronna’s on the team,” the NBC political editor Carrie Budoff Brown said in a statement.

[Read: Why Trump won’t stop suing the media and losing]

Sometimes, the private explanation is more mercenary. When CBS hired former White House Chief of Staff Mick Mulvaney in 2022, an executive bluntly told staffers that the network expected Republicans to capture Congress in that year’s midterm elections, and that Mulvaney would assist in getting “access.” Semafor’s Ben Smith has a related theory for this year: Many corporate leaders seem to have concluded that Donald Trump will win the presidential election, and so they’re trying to make moves to get in his good graces.

The problem is that McDaniel falls short both as an editorial offering and as favor-currying. She spent more than seven years as chair of the RNC, but prior to that had only a short stint as a state party chair. Her management of the national party was undistinguished: Republicans consistently underperformed in elections on her watch, including in 2022. The GOP enters the 2024 election cycle with its fundraising lagging behind the Democrats, and with chaos at the state level. McDaniel is not known for her strategic acumen or ideological fervor. She was chosen for the job for loyalty for Trump, and then discarded later when that loyalty proved insufficient.

McDaniel’s credibility is also in question. As Welker pointed out, she spent years indulging Trump’s claims that the 2020 presidential election was stolen and that January 6 insurrectionists were patriots. McDaniel’s explanation was not reassuring: “When you’re the RNC chair, you kind of take one for the whole team, right? Now I get to be a little bit more myself, right? This is what I believe.” In other words, Trust me, I was lying.

All of this makes it hard to take McDaniel’s on-air political commentary all that seriously. Still, if she’s getting NBC entrée into Republican circles where the mainstream press has struggled to penetrate, that could still be worthwhile.

[Read: What Trump supporters think when he mocks people with disabilities]

But is she? There are three kinds of prominent Republicans: Those who are in Trump’s good graces; those who have been cast out of Trump’s good graces; and those who have always loathed Trump. The third group has no truck with McDaniel, whom they see as a sycophantic sellout. (They note that she dropped her maiden name, Romney, in deference to Trump’s disdain for her uncle.) McDaniel herself is in the second group—she was available for the NBC gig because Trump demanded her removal as RNC chair, after all.

The Trump loyalists in the first group have no affection for McDaniel either. A top campaign official crowed to Politico’s Playbook about her getting caught in the crossfire. No one in Trump’s current orbit will want to appear close to McDaniel for fear of being cast out themselves. If Trump wins the election, McDaniel won’t be able to speak very effectively to his inner circle; and if he loses, she won’t be a credible voice in a post-Trump era of Republican politics.

This leaves McDaniel without any constituency. Her hire offended NBC News journalists. No liberal viewers will like seeing her, and some MSNBC hosts have already ruled out booking her. Neither MAGA Republicans nor the establishment rump will accept her.

This is a devilish moment for news organizations. Outlets that seek to understand Trump and his movement—even those that are very critical—want to find voices that represent them. But finding people who are still connected to Trump and can also speak with intellectual honesty is exceedingly difficult, if not inherently impossible. The McDaniel fiasco shows NBC hasn’t solved the puzzle yet.