DYLAN BYERS: Ronnaghazi and The Hunger Screams of Late-Stage Linear.
On Monday, after the Scarborough crowd opened the 6 a.m. hour with their own admonishment of the McDaniel hire, it became clear that the next 18 hours were going to be devastating for NBC. Early in the afternoon, I was notified that Nicolle Wallace and others intended to speak out that night, and that it was going to be an onslaught. (Wallace, a former Bush II aide, also used MSNBC to outrun some political baggage…) Around that time, Stephen Labaton, the executive vice president of communications for NBC News, and the top P.R. aide to Conde, reached out to McDaniel directly to try to reassure her that Psaki and other former political officials had faced scrutiny when they’d joined NBC, and that it might blow over. According to a source familiar with the discussion, he also told McDaniel that the MSNBC hosts were being “fucking insane.”
In a statement, Labaton told me: “Ronna and I spoke for six minutes on Monday after she indicated she was drafting some kind of statement. I never criticized anyone at MSNBC during that brief conversation. Your account of the conversation is coming from someone who was dropped by the network yesterday.”
Both Labaton and Budoff Brown’s efforts to quell the uprising seemed to emphasize a blind spot. Yes, the green rooms of television news are stuffed with former party chairs, press secretaries, and spokespeople. Indeed, an Axios analysis this week noted that, since 2000, “more than half (16 of 31) of White House press secretaries and communications directors have gone on to become paid contributors, commentators or hosts on news programs.” But as American politics has grown more fractured, these hires have become more problematic. In the Trump era, the most controversial hire was CNN’s appointment of Trump 2016 campaign manager Corey Lewandowski as a paid contributor. Of course, for all his myriad sins, Lewandowski had never participated in an effort to undermine or overthrow an election and then lied about it. The NBC News leadership seemed to overlook that distinction, and how much it would offend the anchors and correspondents who had bought into the “Lean Forward” and “This is Who We Are” mantras.
Of course, as Larry Elder notes, some “election deniers” have much better odds of being able to use MSNBC to rehabilitate their image: MSNBC: One Man’s ‘Election Denier’ Is Another Man’s TV Host.
After McDaniel’s hiring, MSNBC’s Joe Scarborough said he and his “Morning Joe” co-host would not allow McDaniel to appear as a guest. But Sharpton, Scarborough’s colleague, regularly appears on the show. In 2000, when Scarborough served as a Republican member of the U.S. House of Representatives, he proposed a resolution called “Condemning the racist and anti-Semitic views of the Reverend Al Sharpton.” It read in part:
“Whereas the Congress strongly rejects the racist and incendiary actions of the Reverend Al Sharpton;
“Whereas the Reverend Al Sharpton has referred to members of the Jewish faith as ‘bloodsucking [J]ews’, and ‘Jew bastards’;
“Whereas the Reverend Al Sharpton has referred to members of the Jewish faith as ‘white interlopers’ and ‘diamond merchants’;
“Whereas the Reverend Al Sharpton was found guilty of defamation by a jury in a New York court arising from the false accusation that former Assistant District Attorney Steven Pagones, who is white, raped and assaulted a fifteen year-old black girl; …
“Whereas the Reverend Al Sharpton’s vicious verbal anti-Semitic attacks directed at members of the Jewish faith, and in particular, a Jewish landlord, arising from a simple landlord-tenant dispute with a black tenant, incited widespread violence, riots, and the murder of five innocent people; …
“Whereas the Reverend Al Sharpton led a protest in the Crown Heights neighborhood and marched next to a protester with a sign that read, ‘The White Man is the Devil …'”
Apparently, all is forgiven.
Sharpton is also, to use MSNBC’s parlance, an “election denier,” and an egregious one at that. About the 2016 election, Sharpton said: “There’s no question that the process that elected (Trump) was not legitimate. When you look at now the evidence from the intelligence agencies that there was the influence from the Russians …”
So, McDaniel out, Sharpton in. One man’s “election denier” is another man’s MSNBC host.
It helps Sharpton’s little-watched show to remain on air because, “Without the support of Sharpton and his racist admirers, Comcast would not have been able to gain control of NBC,” Daniel Greenfield writes.
But as for Ronna McDaniel’s “election denialism,” the cool kids at MSNBC would have found another reason why she shouldn’t be allowed to sit at their lunch table, Ed Morrissey writes:
They’re “committed to the principle,” Conde claims — right up to the point where executives have to stand up to the down-twinkles of their own employees. That’s where their “commitment” ends. And that means, of course, that they’re not committed to it at all.
So Courage! Much Conviction!
This isn’t just about Ronna McDaniel or J6 either. Kevin Williamson got the exact same treatment at The Atlantic over abortion. Ben Shapiro got iced out of Politico Playbook over ambiguous charges of “bigotry” (likely referring to his opposition to gender ideology). An op-ed on using federal troops to break up urban riots by Senator Tom Cotton made New York Times staffers feel so “unsafe,” in fact, that they forced the paper to withdraw the column and fire the editor who approved it. And just a few months later, the same staffers would demand to know why Cotton’s strategy didn’t get deployed on January 6.
Jack Shafer deduced what actually happened to Williamson at the time, and it applies i
