Ronna McDaniel Called MSNBC “Primetime Propagandists” This Is CNN’s Chris Licht Debacle Redux

I confess to utter noncomprehension of what MSNBC is trying to do these days. Meet The Press has turned into a softball interview, bothsider travesty on Kristen Welker’s watch and this new addition of Ronna Romney McDaniel to the lineup is simply baffling. Calls are out on Twitter to boycott the network. McDaniel has hit the $hitlist already, along with Welker, Katy Tur and Andrea Mitchell.

Tur came up with the observation recently that RFK Jr. would “suck Biden’s voters” and perhaps that’s exactly his game plan. Even Tur’s ex-boyfriend, Keith Olbermann, chastised her publicly for saying something so stupid. Mitchell stirred up a lot of controversy for her criticisms of both Obama and Hillary Clinton. So with the addition of fake electors proponent McDaniel to the firmament of stars, the whole place may simply go nova. Whoever is making these programming decisions must be smoking some whacky tobackey.

Ronna McDaniel is the Sarah Sanders of Kellyanne Conways. I'm glad that NBC News is getting relentless blowback for its decision to hire this propogandist. She deserves to be ostracized, not given a golden parachute.

Also: All the GIFs of her on X are gone. What's going on? pic.twitter.com/W4NZ3TpG31

— Russell Drew (@RussOnPolitics) March 23, 2024

Remember this stellar moment?

Everyone single person involved in the fake electors scheme has to go to jail.

— #1 Jalen Hurts Fan (@Anthony60957284) October 13, 2022

McDaniel has no character. She’s only too happy to sell out the country and have Trump be an illegitimate president. Vladimir Putin assessed the characters in today’s GOP accurately, I give him credit for that. He knows that money and power supersede any and all values. There is no low they won’t go. Even though McDaniel comes from a family of respected Republicans, Mitt Romney and George Romney before him, she’s a weak sister who is only too happy to go along with any play that the fascist Trump dictates to her, including changing her name. If any one action on her part perfectly illustrated who and what she was, that was the one. She’s an utterly gutless shill, a follower, not a leader.

I cannot fathom how anybody at MSNBC thinks that this woman is going to be an asset. The overall thrust of what I see happening is that the insanity of the collapse of the Republican party and its horrific, criminal candidate is being whitewashed and normalized. This is not a good thing.

I don’t know if MSNBC will be boycotted. That would be a shame. The voices of Rachel Maddow, Lawrence O’Donnell and so many would not be heard and they are valid spokespeople. But I wholeheartedly agree that this issue needs to be addressed.

One tweeter suggested turning the TV set off every time that McDaniel appeared. That’s one way, perhaps. Personally, I think a boycott of Meet The Press is in order and I think petitions need to go to MSNBC.

One thing is certain: this issue is just now getting rolling. A lot of people are enraged at this programming decision. That needs to be addressed. MSNBC can’t just continue to alienate its audience. That is suicide.

This is a disaster for MSNBC. The only question is how are they going to deal with it. It poses quite the quandary for the commentators who are there. Doubtlessly Jen Psaki or Rachel Maddow or Lawrence O’Donnell see what’s happening and they have an opinion about this. But they’re employees. They’re not in a position to challenge a management hire. But, on the other hand, they’re somewhat hamstrung if they don’t, because truth is what they stand for and by remaining silent they end up becoming complicit in management’s bad decisions.

This is one hell of a ball of wax. I cannot even begin to speculate what will happen but this much I know: this isn’t over, it’s only beginning and whomever made this decision at the network, stepped in it bigly. You well recall the case of the CNN head, Chris Licht, who had a very brief tenure. I see this incident as a mirror of that.

Licht was disconnected. He wasn’t operating in this dimension. The first thing he did was provide a Town Hall to Donald Trump and Trump proceeded to lie. Then the Atlantic did a profile piece on him that was devastating.

“The thing that struck me was that Licht seemed to be operating on slogans, not actual ideas and didn’t seem to recognize the difference between the two,” observed Jelani Cobb, dean of the Columbia Graduate School of Journalism, after reading Alberta’s article.

And Alberta’s detailed chronicling of Licht’s missteps was astonishing, Cobb told me in text messages.

“Just the accretion of absurdities to the point where you’re like, ‘surely, this can’t all be true.’ And at the same time, it’s like of course, this all seems logical.”

Particularly disturbing were the decisions involving the town hall, especially the way CNN allowed far-right Republicans – Trump’s cult members – to dominate the audience, which was supposed to be made up of ordinary Republican voters and undecided ones.

But it’s possible – likely, even – that Licht would have survived all of this if it weren’t for the one thing that really mattered: the numbers. Ratings, network value and profitability are the coin of the realm in corporatized cable news, and to a large extent, in mainstream media writ large.

“Licht managed to alienate everybody at CNN and people might think giving a magazine profile access was fatally stupid, but my experience of the media industry says all of this would have been irrelevant to a boss’s longevity if he had made ratings go up instead of down,” observed the Los Angeles Times reporter Matt Pearce.

I cite this much detail here because I see the same thing happening at MSNBC as happened at CNN. The hiring of McDaniel is at least as stupid, if not more, than the Trump Town Hall. And I believe that it will have the same effect, bad will and bad ratings. Here’s the moral of the Licht debacle and I predict a replay. There is so much truth in this paragraph that I think it should be embroidered and hung on the wall of every media outlet.

Perhaps the biggest cheeses at CNN have learned the right lessons: that you can’t “both sides” your way into ratings success. That there is no vast political middle just waiting to be entranced by performative neutrality. And, most of all, that good journalism has nothing to do with sucking up to would-be authoritarians but rather it demands brave truth-telling.

That is it, in a nutshell. That is why the hiring of McDaniel was stick, stone, stupid. And once again we are reminded that even though this Trump phenomenon started in 2015 and we are now nine painful years into it, somehow nothing has been learned at the highest level of mainstream media management.

Why that is, I cannot fathom. But if at least one network could grasp the truth — and you would think that one network should be MSNBC — it would go a long way towards solving the problem.

[Top image created by Meidas Touch]