MSNBC Hosts Speak Up for Democracy Loud and Clear!

By Jessie Seigel / March 31, 2024

It is rare and a beautiful thing to see a body of journalists stand up en masse against their bosses for a principle—let alone win.

On Friday, March 22, NBC announced that it had hired Ronna McDaniel, recently deposed chair of the Republican National Committee (RNC), as a paid contributor, for a nifty $300,000 yearly salary. Four days later, the network announced that McDaniel will not be joining the network after all.

The reason? The hosts of major NBC and MSNBC programs rose up on-air to call the network out.

As head of the RNC, Ronna McDaniel aided and abetted Donald Trump in his lies claiming fraud in the 2020 election. As late as in a 2023 interview with Chris Wallace on CNN, she stated she didn’t think President Biden “won it fair.”

She also participated in at least one prong of Trump's coup-attempt, joining in his phone call pressuring two Michigan canvassers not to certify the election results.

In addition, McDaniel led the effort to censure Republican members of Congress Liz Cheney and Adam Kinzinger for daring to participate in the House of Representatives’ investigation of the January 6,2021 attack on the Capitol. Not to mention her bashing mainstream media—and in particular, MSNBC, which she was now joining—as “fake news.”

The Revolt Against NBC Management

On the March 24 edition of Meet the Press, host Kristen Welker preceded her interview of McDaniel with the statement: “This interview was scheduled weeks before it was announced that McDaniel had become a paid NBC News contributor. This will be a news interview and I was not involved in her hiring.”

In the interview, McDaniel tried to whitewash her prior actions, claiming she now acknowledges Joe Biden won fair and square, but: “When you're the RNC Chair, you kind of take one for the whole team.” She added, “Now I get to be a little bit more myself.”

In a panel discussion afterwards, former Meet the Press moderator Chuck Todd said that the NBC executives who hired McDaniel owed Welker an “apology” for putting her in that situation. Todd told Welker, “…I have no idea whether any answer she gave to you was because she didn’t want to mess up her contract.”

But the most substantive objections came from the hosts of the various MSNBC programs that followed.

On Monday, MSNBC’s Morning Joe co-hosts Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski stated that they would not ask McDaniel to be a guest. Brzezinski said, “To be clear, we believe NBC News should seek out conservative Republican voices to provide balance in their election coverage.” She added, “But it should be conservative Republicans, not a person who used her position of power to be an anti-democracy election denier.”

Nicolle Wallace, who anchors the late afternoon Deadline: White House, declared that, by hiring McDaniel, NBC was telling election deniers “not just that they can [spread lies] on our airwaves, but they can do that as one of us, a badge-carrying employee of NBC News, as paid contributors to our sacred airwaves.”

Joy Reid, host of MSNBC’s The ReidOut, said McDaniel’s association with Trump “is not about having Republicans on” NBC News platforms or “fairness and balance.” Rather, hiring her during the 2024 election season “is capitulating to an autocrat in advance by saying, ‘Yes, we will take your apparatchik and allow them to be elevated and platform with us, with journalists.’”

Jen Psaki, host of Inside with Jen Psaki said: “Our democracy is in danger because of the lies that people like Ronna McDaniel have pushed on this country.”

On The Rachel Maddow Show, in addition to calling the hire “inexplicable,” and comparing McDaniel with those who have attempted authoritarian takeovers in the past, Maddow said, “…I want to associate myself with all my colleagues at MSNBC and NBC News who have voiced loud and principled objections to our company for putting on the payroll someone who hasn’t just attacked us as journalists, but someone who is part of an ongoing project to get rid of our system of government.”

Comparing NBC’s employment of McDaniel to hiring “a mobster to work at a D.A.’s office,” Maddow exposed McDaniel as “someone who is still trying to convince Americans that this election stuff doesn’t really work. That this last election wasn’t a real result. That American elections are fraudulent.“

It appears that, by the hour of Rachel Maddow’s Monday evening show, NBC management had changed its course. Maddow said of NBC’s reversal: “I think it is a show of strength and a show of respect for the people who work at this company and make us who we are. That leadership was willing to change on this, I’m grateful to them.”

On Lawrence O’Donnell’s The Last Word, he acerbically advised: “There is an easy way to avoid the controversy NBC News has stumbled into: Don’t hire anyone close to the crimes. That’s what happened to the [Richard] Nixon gang.”

Cesar Conde--the boss--has been Chairman of the NBC Universal News Group since May 2020.

According to the New York Times, in bowing to the reaction of NBC’s and MSNBC’s on-air anchors, Cesar Conde, chairman of the NBC Universal News Group, wrote in a staff memo:

After listening to the legitimate concerns of many of you, I have decided that Ronna McDaniel will not be an NBC News contributor.

No organization, particularly a newsroom, can succeed unless it is cohesive and aligned….Over the last few days, it has become clear that this appointment undermines that goal.

Conde’s statement avoided addressing the staff’s serious, substantive objections or why NBC executives had not on their own thought to consider McDaniel's objectionable actions before hiring her. Instead his statement suggested the decision to fire McDaniel four days after hiring her was merely because staff did not wish to work with her.

Reactions to NBC’s Reversal

USA Today chose to ignore the real problem with the McDaniel hire—her lying in order to aid and abet Trump’s effort to overturn the 2020 election and with it, American democracy. Instead, USA Today tried to draw a false equivalency to MSNBC hiring Jen Psaki as an anchor after she had been the White House press secretary under both President Obama and President Biden.

The National Public Radio program On the Media has raised this as a broader question. It asks whether, in general, those who have been political partisans should be hired as commentators or hosts of news shows. Whether those with such political background can objectively report the news or be investigative journalists.

Both USA Today and On the Media miss the point at issue here.

First, McDaniel was not ultimately rejected because she was a conservative or the head of the RNC. MSNBC has hired both as commentators and as hosts numerous people with that kind of background.

Michael Steele, who began as a guest and now co-hosts a weekend program, was a prior head of the RNC. Nicolle Wallace, a former Republican, was White House communications director under President George W. Bush. And there are already political analysts at the network to represent a range of views, including Marc Short, who was chief of staff to Vice President Mike Pence.

Furthermore, though Jen Psaki had been a partisan in her prior work, she did not, as McDaniel has done, lie and do so in order to destroy democratic processes—the essence of what America is supposed to stand for.

Even more pertinent, On the Media’s concern that political partisans cannot objectively report the news demonstrates a misunderstanding of the established role of programs like those hosted by Joe and Mika, Joy Reid, Nicolle Wallace, Rachel Maddow, and Lawrence O’Donnell, etc.

These are essentially editorial journalists and not pretending to be anything else. They don’t break news. Rather, when reporters—investigative or otherwise—do so, the journalists on these programs analyze it. And yes, they approach that analysis with a particular perspective, but they do not lie or twist the facts to do so.

Unlike Rupert Murdock’s Fox network.

Until the advent of MSNBC, FOX commentary had a near monopoly on the airwaves. For decades, any time I went into an airport, a hotel, or even a restaurant with a TV screen not tuned to sports, it was tuned to FOX’s vitriol. MSNBC became a needed counterweight to the Fox right-wing hosts and pundits.

In her argument against the McDaniel hire, Mika Brzezinski maintained that NBC News should still seek out conservative Republican voices to provide balance in their election coverage. But unless Fox and its even farther right doppelgangers add liberal Democrats to their line-ups—which is about as likely as Trump quitting politics to become a monk—the balance Brzezinski and the NBC hierarchy claim to seek will merely extend the reach of the right wing’s propaganda soapbox even farther.

Both-side-ism for alleged balance is not balance at all. In the face of lies that threaten the survival of democracy and instigation of violence against any who oppose that threat, refusing to take a stand because it would be “political” is actually taking a political stand that favors the authoritarians and their mob.

That is the situation in which MSNBC found itself. Until challenged, its executives apparently thought it was fine, in the name of so-called balance, to give MAGA propagandists access to their airwaves in addition to the access MAGA already has at FOX, Newsmax, Truth Social, etc. The hosts of MSNBC’s various programs understood the danger to which NBC executives were turning a blind eye, fought it, and stopped it.

Some may still ask whether MSNBC is practicing proper journalism if it does not pay some other McDaniel to give voice to the right-wing’s talking points. My answer: Edward R. Murrow, perhaps the most respected journalist in America’s history, did not provide the witch-hunting Senator Joseph McCarthy or his henchman Roy Cohn free rein on his program or hire them to provide so-called balance. He took a stand to expose them.