A Brief Timeline of NBC's Boneheaded Decision to Hire Ronna McDaniel

By Dustin Rowles | TV | March 28, 2024 |

By Dustin Rowles | TV | March 28, 2024 |

For whatever reason, we haven’t given a lot of coverage to the Ronna Romney McDaniel/NBC News story. Now that the post-mortems are being written on her very brief stint with the network, it’s worth documenting here because it is a rare instance in which talent took on the corporation and won.

Two months ago, Ronna McDaniel saw the writing on the wall. Even though she’d dropped the Romney from her name out of deference to a man who hated her uncle, Mitt Romney, Donald Trump was still going to oust her as the Chair of the Republican National Committee because he wanted to put his people in there so he could divert all of the money toward his campaign and his legal fees. The networks knew that she’d be fired soon, and she was heavily sought after by the corporate suits at most of the networks because they wanted to give the illusion of covering both sides (by ignoring facts).

NBC News eventually won the bidding war—those poor bastards. The corporate suits — specifically, Cesar Conde, chairman of the NBC News Group, and network senior vice president Carrie Budoff Brown — were thrilled. However, they clearly did not speak to any of the talent who works for NBC News before making the announcement. What’s more is that Rashida Jones, the president of MSNBC (and not the star of Parks and Recreation), also wanted McDaniel for MSNBC. McDaniel was initially hesitant because she knew she’d get beat up by the liberals on MSNBC, so she negotiated a bigger contract to appear on both networks. Ah, the irony.

After the announcement, the shit hit the fan. Social media lost its mind, but so did Chuck Todd, who had been kicked upstairs to be NBC News Chief Political Analyst after being booted from Meet the Press. Todd took the network to task Sunday, on air, for spending $300,000 a year to hire an election denier to provide commentary for the esteemed NBC News. Todd opened the floodgates. He wasn’t fired for calling the network out, so the rest of the network decided to join the dogpile, beginning with Joe and Mika in the morning and ending with an ethical sermon from Rachel Maddow by the evening.

The suits tried to salvage the situation by announcing that McDaniel would not be appearing on MSNBC even though they had paid her extra to do so. That didn’t quell the rebellion. By Tuesday, NBC had dropped McDaniel. McDaniel’s agency, CAA, soon followed, recognizing that McDaniel was too toxic to appear on any mainstream network but not toxic enough to land on the Trump Networks. The Trump people dislike her because she somehow wasn’t loyal enough despite pushing the election lie. Now, she’s suing NBC for breach of contract and defamation. She has a good case for the breach of contract. Defamation? Not so much.

What does this mean for the future of the news networks? They will accept a lot to provide the both sides illusion, but there is clearly a red line at election denialism.

Source: WashPo, Puck