The Corporate Media War On Facts and America (w/ Update)

I wrote awhile back about the blind eye of the national / mainstream media - especially the Beltway Media that tracks our political discourse 24/7 - and where I made observations about why that media behaved irresponsibly about the partisan nature of the Far Right. Fellow blogger Green Eagle posted this comment pointing out something I overlooked:

Here is the real reason: Before Ronald Reagan took office, over 80% of the press was owned by individuals and small companies. Thanks to Reagan's "deregulation" of the media, today, about 90% of the press is owned by large corporations or multi-billionaires, almost all of which are Republicans. When I hear people explain what causes the press to behave the way it does, I want to ask them, did you never have a job in your life? And if you did have a job, did you do what you wanted, or what the boss wanted? Our mainstream press is doing what the boss wants, period. That is the real, entire story of why Democrats will never get a fair break from the national media, whose owners cannot fathom the idea that things will not be better off if government gives them everything they want.

I've thought back to GE's comment recently because this weekend the owners of NBC proved that when they hired Ronna Romney McDaniel - the head of the Republican National Committee that just got booted out by donald trump in a hostile takeover - to be a regular contributor to their news division at an obscene salary of $300,000 as though there was nothing wrong with her.

Even though there is a shit-ton wrong with her: Above all, McDaniel's unwarranted and dangerous election denialism, willingness to do trump's dirty work, and attempts to undo the 2020 election results.

McDaniel's hiring is actually standard operating procedure in the national media workplace: Over the decades, the news networks routinely hired politicians and political handlers to work as pundits from both major political parties (and even a few Libertarians to spice up the crazy).

But McDaniel's hire set off fire alarms throughout the industry, because it threatened one thing: Defending - and worse, normalizing - trump and the Far Right's open war against democracy itself.

David A. Graham at the Atlantic documented the horror show (paywalled):

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.

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.

When that "Both Sideism" hack Chuck Todd is freaking out, when Far Right former congresscritter Scarborough is objecting on-air, you know the head honchos at NBC crossed a line. 

Graham posted his Atlantic article before major MSNBC figure Rachel Maddow got her two cents in, and oh yeah Maddow dropped napalm on the hiring (via Dominick Mastrangelo at The Hill):

“If you care what I think about this, the fact that Ms. McDaniel is on the payroll at NBC News — to me that is inexplicable,” Maddow said on her show. “You wouldn’t hire a wise guy, a made man like a mobster, to work in a DA’s office. 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 it’s not about Democratic party, Republican party, it’s not about partisanship or right versus left,” she continued. “It’s about our system of government and undermining elections and going after democracy.”

Maddow highlighted McDaniel’s role in Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election and said NBC, like all news organizations, is currently tasked with “trying to cover an election … and cover bad actors who are using the rights and privileges of a democracy to end democracy...”

While McDaniel's first appearance on Meet the Press showed her reversing her stance and claiming the 2020 election "was fair," it still doesn't undo the actual damage McDaniel committed while serving as RNC Chair (and overlooks the possibility she can be charged in Michigan for her efforts to throw out thousands of votes). And even though trump kneecapped her and drove her from her leadership position among Republicans, you can guarantee that McDaniel - daughter to a powerful GOP political family, long-standing conservative on her own - will "carry the water" for a Republican Party that will spend most of the 2024 election cycle playing out trump's gaslighting over "unfair elections" and "stolen ballots."

Graham even wonders what actual value McDaniel has that would be of interest to the NBC bosses who signed off on her contract:

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.

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... 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...

...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...

In some respects it was never about McDaniel's place in trump's inner circle of power (she was easily dismissed like many others before her). If we look closely at McDaniel herself, all she presents - to the media and the nation watching her - is a consistent, hard conservative world-view of tax cuts to the rich (that ever-fixed mark she shares with her father), deregulations across the board, and slashing at social safety nets to make the poor suffer more.

It's a world-view consistent with the cruelty and self-serving interests of the corporate powers as well.

Like Green Eagle notes, our Beltway Media is corporate-owned and fixated on the narratives that serve their needs, rather than the factual reporting that the national audiences need to stay properly informed.

If the CEO and managers in control of NBC - and ABC, and CBS, and Fox, and C-Span for that matter, hell throw in ESPN and the Weather Channel while we're at it - want certain messages and narratives and explanations (and gaslighting) to get broadcast, they will hire the people - usually those within their own small circles of colleagues and party invites - that will shill those narratives while raking in annual salaries more than triple that of their standard employees (it doesn't help NBC's judgment when they've recently fired 100 people to clear payroll).

NBC is going to hire pundits who will gladly talk up "the benefits" of tax cuts for the rich and "reforming" Social Security and Medicare and all the other standard Far Right talking points, especially during an election cycle when they need to overwhelm the public forum with their skewed priorities. It's just that the CEOs and people who made this deal happen didn't pay attention to all the damage McDaniel is really threatening to inflict - the end of voting rights, the destruction of fair elections, the rise of authoritarian figures like trump seeking to burn the American Dream down to rule the ashes - as part of her messaging.

It's not shocking that NBC hired a prominent Republican. It's shocking that they hired one willing to destroy America.

Update: It's later in the day and the reports are out that NBC will sever ties with McDaniel, although it may be a messy situation because McDaniel will likely be looking for a lawsuit claiming her First Amendment rights were denied. This is going to cost the network a ton of money, as well it should, and the people involved are likely going to get "encouraged" to retire on their own terms in short order. But it remains a serious problem that the CEOs and company heads are going to try this again, hiring another "trump insider" who will shill the upper-class agenda of "SAVE US FROM DEMOCRATS TAXING THE RICH THEIR FAIR SHARE".