Opinion | When an Operative Becomes a Journalist — and Why Ronna McDaniel Flopped

In the years before I took the vow of journalistic purity, I was a political operative — or aide — or hack. I worked in the Senate office and presidential campaign of Robert F. Kennedy. I wrote speeches for New York City Mayor John Lindsay. I worked with legendary political maven Dave Garth on any number of campaigns, writing ads, prepping for debates, hammering out slogans. In my spare time, I wrote magazine pieces and a book or two.

I left this lucrative line of work in 1976 because I realized I could not work in politics and write about it at the same time. More than two years after I quit, I started appearing on CBS' "Sunday Morning” as a media critic; by 1980 I found myself working at the national political conventions as an analyst along with Bill Moyers and James Kilpatrick. And for the next four decades, I did political analysis for four networks.

So I know what it’s like to make the journey that Republican National Committee Chair Ronna McDaniel seemingly tried to do when she accepted a role as a paid contributor to NBC News, before being ousted after a revolt at the network. As one of a small army of one-time political operatives-turned-news analysts, I have a clear, firm view on whether such a move is defensible: It depends.

The relevant questions are: What has this newly minted media figure really been hired to say; are they upfront about their prejudices and identified as partisans, or are they able to put aside their recent political work and speak the honest truth? There’s a bit of cognitive dissonance that exists in this transformation; it’s not easy to move from newsmaker to analyst in a matter of days.

The case of McDaniel raises a different question all its own: Why did the NBC News brass think it a nifty idea to hire someone who had slammed its own journalists and actively participated in an attempt to undo an election? That record alone suggests she may have failed on the key questions facing any operative-turned-pundit. Certainly that’s what the journalists at the network believed.

Still, NBC’s massive error in judgment doesn’t mean operatives should be off limits as analysts — and that includes hiring a conservative, Donald Trump-supporting political observer.

First, it is simply too draconian to make political work a permanent ban on a journalistic career. Should Walter Lippmann have been barred from his work as a columnist because he worked for the socialist mayor of Schenectady, New York? Should ABC News not have hired Dwight Eisenhower’s press secretary James Hagerty as its president? More to the point, it makes little sense to impose a one-size-fits-all test.

It also may be difficult to accept this notion, but the idea that a one-time political foot soldier can put their preferences to one side is not that absurd. Think of Tim Russert, who spent years working for Democrats such as Sen. Pat Moynihan and Gov. Mario Cuomo. When he joined NBC News and then became moderator of Meet the Press, Russert demonstrated that he was fully comfortable holding public figures to account regardless of party.

Or, to get personal again, back in 1980, I was making the argument that Ronald Reagan was competing aggressively and successfully for traditional Democratic working-class votes. Thirty-five years later, in this space, I was writing that Trump was a far more serious presidential contender than conventional wisdom suggested, and that Hillary Clinton was a uniquely vulnerable candidate.

Did those judgments mean I wanted those things to happen? Not exactly. For any journalist — but particularly those who have come from the political universe and now are working to a different purpose — the most significant danger is to let the wish be father to the thought.

Some media figures can even retain their political ties as long as they can demonstrate a degree of separation. Karl Rove has been an active player in conservative-Republican circles through all his years as a Fox News analyst and Wall Street Journal columnist. But he’s also been highly critical of Trump and the stratagems of the House Freedom Caucus. Maybe most relevant, no one who is watching Rove has any illusions about his leanings (or for that matter, the leanings of Fox News in general).

For some of us, the transition to journalism meant moving beyond the role of a commentator. I spent time freezing in the snows of Iowa and New Hampshire; pushing my way through the mosh pits of convention floors; covering the last days of apartheid in South Africa — you know, reporting.

But with the rise of cable news, and the recognition that putting people behind a table in a studio is a lot cheaper than sending a reporter, producer and camera crew out to cover a story, “talking heads” now dominate the air. And they appear on these networks to offer more or less the same opinions they were offering as political players. It’s not that such hiring necessarily raises ethical questions; it’s that it doesn’t move the discourse very much at all. More than once, I’ve thought the networks could save a lot of money by dispensing with the talking heads and deploying sock puppets, whose offerings would be no less predictable than their human counterparts.

In announcing the decision to cut ties with McDaniel, NBCUniversal News Group Chair Cesar Conde told employees she was first hired out of a desire to present audiences with “a widely diverse set of viewpoints” and that the company now intended to “redouble our efforts to seek voices that represent different parts of the political spectrum.”

But will the anchors on MSNBC welcome a different pro-Trump arrival? Joy Reid has said she would happily host Republicans and specifically cites former GOP Reps. Adam Kinzinger and Liz Cheney, two of Trump’s harshest critics. With respect, I think Reid is missing the point: “never Trump” Republicans do not expand political diversity at the network.

And would MSNBC’s audience accept a pro-Trump addition to the network’s lineup? Like much of the Fox News audience, MSNBC’s followers hear every night an affirmation of their views. Years ago, Democratic Sen. Barbara Boxer told me she went home each night and watched MSNBC. Why, I asked, after endless hours in the Senate, do you do that? “Because,” she said, “it’s like sinking into a nice warm bath.” It’s not clear she or her fellow viewers would welcome an ice-cold splash of pro-Trump perspectives.

The bottom line though is transparency. If a paid talking head is on the air to speak for a particular point of view, then there should be no pretense that the audience is getting anything else. And if a political operative-turned-journalist is offering an analysis ostensibly unrelated to their past political ties, then that journalist needs to be damn sure that is what’s happening. The easiest way to trap yourself into misleading the audience is to mislead yourself.