Well, that didn’t last long. NBC has officially cut ties with Ronna McDaniel following a public revolt by the network’s top on-air talent against the former Republican National Committee chair. It’s a welcome move, at least in that it will keep a key player in Donald Trump’s effort to overthrow democracy in 2020 from laundering election denialism through MSNBC. “It looks like our company listened to us, to you, and did what was right,” Alex Wagner said on her program Tuesday night. But this clean-up effort by NBCU News Group Chairman Cesar Conde is unlikely to get rid of the mess the outlet made in hiring McDaniel in the first place.
Indeed, the Trump right won the moment McDaniel inked her contract: Either it would get a MAGA shill on the platform, or it would get to complain after her firing that the mainstream media is silencing conservative voices, as they quickly began doing after Conde sent a memo to staffers acknowledging their “legitimate concerns” about putting McDaniel on air.
“NBC ‘News’ is an absolute disgrace,” House Speaker Mike Johnson posted. “Good luck to the next conservative who trusts these people,” added Megyn Kelly, who spent a little more than a year at NBC before her show was canceled in 2018 following comments she made in defense of blackface. Trump, who pushed McDaniel out at the RNC, also chimed in with some mockery of both McDaniel and the network: “She only lasted two days, and this after McDaniel went out of her way to say what they wanted to hear,” he wrote on his social media platform. “These Radical Left Lunatics are CRAZY, and the top people at NBC ARE WEAK.” Ted Cruz, perhaps more pundit than politician at this point, noted that Todd and others at NBC—including Jen Psaki, who served as press secretary in Joe Biden’s White House—had formerly held posts as Democrats. “But, NBC hired a Republican??!!?!” he wrote. “It’s the end of the world.”
The issue, of course, is not that McDaniel is a Republican. It’s that she was an active participant in Trump’s plot to overturn a democratic election in 2020, an apologist for the violent insurrection he inspired, and an enabler of his quest to return to power on an even more authoritarian agenda. McDaniel wouldn’t have been a voice of traditional conservatism at the network, as Michael Steele, another former RNC chair, has long been. She’d have been a mouthpiece for Trump’s tyrannical vision, at a moment when the danger he poses to democracy is mounting.
The network may have avoided that in heeding their employees’ outcry. “I am grateful for Cesar making the right decision,” Joy Reid said Tuesday evening. (Neither McDaniel nor an NBC spokesperson immediately returned requests for comment from Vanity Fair.) “It’s a show of respect for the people at this company,” Rachel Maddow echoed. But NBC could still pay the price, as McDaniel reportedly seeks the full $600,000 on her two-year contract, its reporters face potential fallout with sources, and the outlet’s credibility takes a hit—from the pro-democracy coalition, which was correctly maddened by her hiring in the first place, and from MAGA Republicans, who now get to use executives’ course-correction as ammunition in their bad-faith attacks on the media.
