This is a good news/bad news kind of a scenario. The good news, obviously, is that public opinion was recognized and the right thing was done. Ronna Romney McDaniel made her first and last public appearance as an NBC commentator on Sunday. The bad news is that she was hired in the first place. Rachel Maddow called it “inexplicable.” Maybe Ms. Maddow assumes that her bosses have at least one foot on the ground and I’m not sure that’s a wise assumption to make.Â
Puck News reported NBC planned to drop McDaniel and executives were deliberating over the details. It also reported McDaniel is seeking legal representation. There has not been an official network announcement about McDaniel but one is pending, reporter Dylan Byers wrote on X.
McDaniel, known for her close alliance with Donald Trump while RNC chair, came under fire immediately after her hiring was announced, due to her association with efforts to overturn Trump’s 2020 election defeat and previous rhetoric that President Biden’s victory was unfair. MSNBC President Rashida Jones, who initially had signed off on bringing on McDaniel, had to assure her progressive channel’s talent that McDaniel wouldn’t appear on their “sacred airwaves,” as Nicolle Wallace put it. […]
“There’s a reason why there are a lot of journalists at NBC News uncomfortable with this, because many of our professional dealings with the RNC over the last six years have been met with gaslighting, have been met with character assassination,” Todd said Sunday. He called on NBC honchos to apologize to Welker as well.
The following day, “Morning Joe” co-hosts Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski derided NBC for bringing on McDaniel, with Brzezinski saying she hoped “NBC will reconsider its decision.”
Beginning Monday afternoon with Wallace, one of the faces of MSNBC’s political coverage and a rabid booster of the Democratic Party, partisan MSNBC hosts added their two cents in a coordinated pressure campaign against network leadership.
McDaniel is the queen of gaslighting and character assassination. She comes by it honestly, serving as one of Donald Trump’s handmaidens. It does pique interest, however, why the C-Suite level people who made this ghastly hiring decision did so. Are they really that isolated from not only the day to day reality of their own network but also what is going on in this country this election year?
How can that be? Every network in the country reports on the flame out du jour of the Republican party, Moses Mikey’s latest travails, Marge Greene’s latest theatrics, Trump’s latest fundraising stunts. That’s the daily bill of fare. How did they miss that?
In any event, it was reported that McDaniel was to be paid $300,000 as salary, which is in itself a travesty and now she’ll get some portion of that as damages. Who knows? McDaniel deserves $300,000 a year as a political commentator like I deserve $300,000 a year for being chief surgeon at the Mayo Clinic. It’s an insane proposition on its face.
And it was made with the bothsiderism philosophy and with an eye towards having access to Trump should the worse come to the worse. NBC evidently isn’t interested in preventing the worse coming to the worse, they just want to make sure that their ass is covered when and if it does.
At least MS had the saving grace to tell the NBC half that there was NO way she’d be on the cable network.
a few weeks ago Keith Olbermann said the whole point to having fuck you money is to be able to tell the bosses fuck you for the right cause. Maybe some of them finally did.
Awwwww, widdle snowflake ronna got a taste of what it is like to have a real job. I don’t know wtf goes on in the boob tube biz but out in the real world you generally have anywhere from 90 days to a full year during which the employer can fire you for any reason or even no reason at all: it’s called the probationary period. This gives the employer a chance re-think a bad hiring decision. Perhaps they didn’t have enough time to thoroughly vet what the particular hire might do to the organization. Hell, there are a host of reasons/non-reasons for needing to rescind a job offer or the job if the person has already started–bad fit in the organization is a big one in fact and I think she was an extraordinarily bad fit. I should think a job with the public exposure such at snowflake was offered would be contingent upon public acceptance of her on the boob tube. Given the amount of backlash to the job offer, I’d have to say public acceptance was not very high and NBC was well within their rights to get her the f*ck out of there. Let’s face it, NBC has been a loser network, and is getting worse, for years so they don’t need another reason for people to change the channel.
I read somewhere today that the hiring was a unanimous decision by the higher ups. That’s the problem. The higher ups are completely out of touch with how this decision would be received. If they had only ASKED a few key producers, anchors, they would have known.
“And it was made with the bothsiderism philosophy and with an eye towards having access to Trump should the worse come to the worse.”
Who in the holy fork at NBC thought that having Ronna would give them “access to Trump” when Trump was the one who forced her out of the GOP National Committee in the first place, leading her to look for work elsewhere?
Trump made it very loudly known he wasn’t happy with Ronna for the past year. I mean, she actually allowed other people to challenge his coronation. Maybe the fact that she did just step down as the party chairperson without so much as a real fight means she didn’t completely get on Donald’s bad side permanently but I just can’t imagine anyone at NBC thinking that Ronna would still give access to Trump that easily.