Ronna McDaniel spent the past seven years as chair of the Republican National Committee until Donald Trump fired her a few weeks ago. On Friday she was hired by NBC News on a reported $300,000 contract.
Today she was interviewed on Meet the Press. The interview was scheduled weeks ago, before McDaniel was hired, but it was still awkward. Longtime NBC political analyst Chuck Todd went ballistic afterward:
Let me deal with the elephant in the room. I think our bosses owe you an apology for putting you in this situation because I don't know what to believe. She is now a paid contributor by NBC News. I have no idea whether any answer she gave to you was because she didn't want to mess up her contract.
....There's a reason why there's 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. So that's where you begin here. And so when NBC made the decision to give her NBC News' credibility you've got to ask yourself, "What does she bring NBC News?"
Kudos to Todd for saying this publicly, but I still have to ask: Now that he's no longer the anchor of MTP, Todd is willing to say that the RNC is basically a bunch of thugs and liars. Did he ever say that while he was the anchor of MTP?
Maybe he did! Please school me if he's ever spoken the truth about this before. Somehow, though, I doubt it. It's sort of like all those Republican members of Congress who stolidly go along with everything until they leave office, whereupon they suddenly admit their party has been a disgrace for years. Maybe say it a little sooner, guys?
"Did he ever say that while he was the anchor of MTP?"
why would the king of bothsiderism ever do that? lol
How would he get those liars to show up again?
There was a moment on MTP when trump had just won.
The "round table" or what ever, where all the pundits gathered for the day to comment their comments.
They all expressed incredulity that trump had won -AND would pivot.
Hugh Hewitt ran with the ball that as journalists they should all embrace this as normal. I watched the air go out of the room that day.
They all did. Chuck Toad is no exception.
I rarely watched Todd. But what I remember of him is that he repeatedly let RepubliQans say anything they wanted and total, gaslighting bullshit went unchallenged. He was useless as a journalist.
Say it sooner? That's not how the both-sides, maintain-your-access-at-all-costs system works.
+1
Since he's going to be insubordinate, maybe Todd could come clean with the number of times his bosses interfered with his own editorial independence.
mtp was also waiting patiently for 'the day that trump truly became our president'
j6 finally put paid to that, but now ronna mcdaniel is getting paid good money to tell us how democrats are the *real threats to democracy
Well, ABC already has Reince Priebus.
Those guys never really lose because they have all the money.
He will forever be Prince Reibus to me. And not in a good way.
As to both Todd and retiring Republicans, since when has it been the case that the truth mattered much to either top-level journalists or politicians? Why should either of them bother to say the things you mention? Merely because they're true and significant? That's not really in any of their job descriptions.
He would never have confronted her in this way if he had been on the MTP panel. It’s easy to write this kind of thing. If you never said that thing when you had the chance, in front of an audience who would recount it, then anything you write about the person is irrelevant.
This sounds like a confession, IMO. "I, Chuck Todd, didn't want to mess up my contract. Throughout the years, I made sure to bring false equivalence into my show to avoid getting into trouble with my bosses."
This and nothing but this is the answer.
"It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it."
~Upon Sinclair
Once you can fake authenticity, the gold standard of American journalism, you've got it in the bag. This is just Todd's way of signaling his authenticity. As a journalist his authenticity is bound up with "objectivity." By "being hard on both sides" he's an AUTHENTIC HARD-HITTING JOURNALIST. Not the other kinds.
TV news is the very worst way to be informed. Any TV news. Avoid.
Didn't Todd claim a few years ago that it wasn't the media's job to call out lies or correct lies made on air?
Now he has an issue with lies?
This is a pretty good example of why people vote for Trump, I think.
It's all so swampy.
Sure, Trump (and his family) is the biggest swamp creature of all, but at least he calls it the swamp all the time. When Chuck Todd does it, it's rare and unusual enough that it gets a blog item.
>Did he ever say that while he was the anchor of MTP?
The Politico article about this (https://politi.co/43Es2GU) suggests that Todd was heavily muzzled by the higher-ups. He may well be out of fucks to give.
I think Todd truly believes telling the truth was not his job as MTP host or as a journalist is general. That would be unfair bias. Why he happened to actually do so this one time, I'm not quite sure.
Linda Ellerbee wrote a book, And So it Goes, in the mid-eighties, just as 24-hour cable news was starting and the networks were floundering. One of her anecdotes— I think this would’ve been in the late seventies, pre-Turner CNN— was about a young reporter who diligently prepped for her first MTP appearance and was later rebuked for being too adversarial. No one would agree to be on MTP if the questions were too hard, even back then!
That book soured me on journalism, which was my first declared major, although I don’t think that was Ellerbee’s goal. Considering how much she was drinking during that decade, she put out some excellent writing, though.