Why Chuck Todd’s Scorcher Against NBC Matters

As if responding to an alarm setting on a cosmic, biological clock, the press and its minders set to ringing and clanging bloody murder over the weekend as NBC News moved Ronna McDaniel — the recently sacked Republican National Committee chair — to a paid gig in its studio.

The hottest criticism took place on NBC News’ own Sunday edition of Meet the Press after McDaniel made her first appearance, when Chuck Todd, Meet the Press’ former host, laid down a barrage of verbal spitfire. NBC News bosses owed the current host, Kristen Welker, an apology for foisting McDaniel on the show, Todd said. “I have no idea whether any answer she gave to you was because she didn’t want to mess up her contract,” Todd said.

It was a remarkable 2 minutes 21 seconds of television. First, because the first law of journalism was violated by allowing the program itself to become the story. And second, because it put a glaring spotlight on one of the fundamental flaws embedded in the modern news ecosystem, and cable news in particular: the toxic revolving door between political operatives and mainstream media.

Why did the McDaniel hiring blow up into a full-scale conflagration for NBC News unlike some other episodes that quickly fade away? Once again thank Donald Trump. The press has struggled with how to cover Trump since he first launched his presidential candidacy in 2015, all the way through to his 2024 campaign; it also hasn’t forgotten Trump and his lieutenants’ constant attacks on journalists. As another Meet the Press show guest, Kimberly Atkins Stohr, told Welker, McDaniel’s “credibility was shot,” adding accurately that McDaniel “habitually joined Trump in attacking the press, members of the press, including this network, in a way that put journalists at risk, in danger.”

But as noted above — rather than being an aberration — the hiring of a politico like McDaniel by a news organization and the resulting upchuck of outrage is a well-grooved template. News outlets have been hiring politicians, from the tainted to the radioactive, for more than a half-century. That might not extinguish the current round of outrage over McDaniel’s appointment, nor should it. But if we’re going to uniformly denounce NBC News for taking McDaniel aboard, we must examine how it came to be that a person who has demonized the press and has backstopped Trump’s lies about election fraud came to be enlisted in NBC News’ truth-telling mission.

Television news networks and even the New York Times have been recruiting political operatives for a long time. President Lyndon Johnson’s top aide Bill Moyers, who became a CBS News journalist in 1976, was party to a Johnson administration mission to hunt gay people in the White House. In 1973, the New York Times gave Nixon speechwriter William Safire a column, prompting former Timesperson David Halberstam to write a letter of protest to the publisher calling Safire a “a paid manipulator. He is not a man of ideas or politics but rather a man of tricks. ... It’s a lousy column and it’s a dishonest one. So close it. Or you end up just as shabby as Safire.”

Setting aside the bevy of politicos hired over the years by the Fox News channel — Sarah Palin, Newt Gingrich, Rick Santorum, Mike Huckabee, Karl Rove, John Kasich, Dana Perino, Ben Carson, et al. — a migration path as reliable as that of the caribou has been trod to the networks by politicians, their aides, their speechwriters, and in one case political offspring: Diane Sawyer to CBS News and then ABC News; Chris Matthews to MSNBC; Joe Scarborough to MSNBC; Tim Russert to NBC News; Susan Molinari to CBS News; Mary Matalin to CNN; Bay Buchanan to CNN; Pat Buchanan to CNN; Paul Begala to CNN; Sarah Isgur to ABC News; Van Jones to CNN; Al Sharpton to MSNBC; Bill Bradley to CBS News; Dee Dee Myers to CNBC; Jennifer Granholm to CNN; David Axelrod to CNN; David Gergen to CNN; Donna Brazile to ABC News; Lawrence O’Donnell to MSNBC; Nicolle Wallace to MSNBC; Symone Sanders-Townsend to MSNBC; Jen Psaki to MSNBC; George Stephanopoulos to ABC News; Mick Mulvaney to CBS News; Corey Lewandowski to CNN; and many more, including nepo-baby Chelsea Clinton who, according to POLITICO, was paid a reported $600,000 a year by NBC News. And that’s just the shortlist.

It may be unfair to directly compare every one of these broadcasters with McDaniel, who rarely heard a Trump lie she would publicly rebut. But almost without exception — especially in the cases where the broadcasters were once press secretaries or speechwriters — their jobs as operatives were to bend the facts to serve political ends, not the truth. Their backstories might not be as sordid as McDaniel’s, but in many cases, they worked the same side of the street as she.

You could take this whole long rosters of politicos turned broadcasters and plot it on a graph with, say, Bill Bradley occupying the most noble position on the Y axis and McDaniel on the least noble point and rate them all on a line between the two according to their lifetime allegiance to the upright. But many of them, like McDaniel, have little business being part of the truth-telling business that journalism is supposed to be.

How did we get here? Print journalism, with the exception of a few columnist slots, does a good job of reporting the news without hiring political has-beens and hacks. Why do they abound on TV? The answer seems to be since the arrival of 24/7 cable, the news maw’s hunger for commentary has prompted the networks to hire newsmakers and former newsmakers and keep them in the network stall to comment on the news because it’s more economically efficient than finding fresh and knowledgeable unpaid sources every time a story needs reporting. In both the Trump era and the post-Trump era, MSNBC and CNN struggled to find a way to credibly present the Trump side of many debates, hence CNN’s employment of Trump popinjay Jeffrey Lord, which with the hiring of Lewandowski crossed long ago whatever journalistic Rubicon the ethicists are now fretting about.

McDaniel’s appointment also signals NBC News’ anxiety about not having a way to reach voters in the Trump-dominated GOP. Sure, they could Zoom McDaniel into the studio as an occasional unpaid source, but putting her on the payroll, they must think, gives them a direct and reliable connection to Republican voters.

Todd’s forceful repudiation of McDaniel’s hiring looks from the outside like a principled stand against the NBC News hackery. And, I suppose it is. But what’s the principle? He opposes hiring her, but he was happy to have her as a guest when he ran the show. Is the principle here that it’s OK for NBC to showcase unpaid guests who have an offbeat relationship with the truth but that it should be taboo to hire them? Todd’s outburst also cloaks the controversy in the protective camouflage of dissent from the corporate executives, perhaps dissipating some of the anger on the center and left. Meanwhile, assuming NBC News doesn’t buckle against the criticism and cut ties with McDaniel, the company can still deflect some of the accurate criticism that MSNBC tilts left during most of its broadcast day. “We’re not partisan,” NBC News can say, “we have Ronna McDaniel working for us.”

The problem with the McDaniel appointment for NBC News is that, unlike regular politicians, she has no constituency of her own, a point made by University of Maine scholar Michael Socolow on X Sunday. “MAGA doesn’t like or respect her, and neither do Democrats. Who’s she going to draw to the television screen?" he wrote. Nor can she dependably toe the Trumpian line because not even Trump knows what the Trumpian line is from day to day. How can she possibly keep up?

The McDaniel hiring speaks to a long-running poverty of imagination at television’s news divisions. Network bosses have come to believe that the news is a river that flows out of the mouths of official sources and is then routed to viewers by former members of the club. So go ahead and shriek about Ronna McDaniel’s hiring. Just as long as you save lung power to protest all the other political veterans doing time on the air.

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