Internal liberal outrage boiled over into an on-air struggle session on Meet the Press. NBC just hired Ronna McDaniel immediately after she was removed as Republican National Committee leader, and so moderator Kristen Welker punched away at McDaniel for 20 minutes, and when that was finished, they had a roundtable about the horror of NBC’s hiring, combined with this awkward interview, which was scheduled before the personnel move.
Everyone on set seemed blissfully unaware of how it looked to the public when NBC was negotiating with White House press secretary Jen Psaki about a position while she was still at the White House. No one’s ever complained in a Sunday morning meltdown.
Former host Chuck Todd began the internal decompression with a fulsome apology:
TODD: Look, let me deal with the elephant in the room. I think our bosses owe you an apology for putting you in this situation because I don’t know what to believe. She is now a paid contributor by NBC News. I have no idea whether any answer she gave to you was because she didn’t want to mess up her contract. She wants us to believe that she was speaking for the RNC when the RNC was paying for it. So she has – she has credibility issues that she still has to deal with. Is she speaking for herself or is she speaking on behalf of who’s paying her? Once at the RNC she did say that,”Hey, I’m speaking for the party.” I get that. That’s part of the job. So what about here?
I will say this. I think your interview did a good job of exposing I think many of the contradictions. And, look, there’s a reason why there’s 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. So it is – , you know, that’s where you begin here. And so when NBC made the decision to give her NBC News’ credibility you’ve got to ask yourself, “What does she bring NBC News?” And when we make deals like this, and I’ve been at this company a long time, you’re doing it for access, access to audience.
Todd concluded by again praising Welker’s grilling: “I think you did everything you could do. You got put into an impossible situation, booking this interview, and then all of a sudden the rug’s pulled out from under you. You find out she’s being paid to show up. That’s – that’s unfortunate for this program, but I am glad you did the best that you could, and that’s why the three of us are on here, to try to bolster that editorial independence.“
They’re so deep inside a Democrat bubble they have no idea half of America starts pointing and laughing when they talk about “editorial independence.” NBC, the network that had Kennedy offspring Maria Shriver as a reporter for years, and then hired Chelsea Clinton as a reporter (and she’d never been a reporter).
Kimberly Atkins Stohr seconded Todd’s emotion: “So her credibility is completely shot. So I have to do what Maya Angelou said, I believe what they do and not anything that she said today. And in that I know that she habitually lied, she habitually joined Trump in attacking the press – members of the press, including this network, in a way that put journalists at risk, in danger.”
Stephen Hayes of The Dispatch, an anti-Trump website, began with the obvious point about conservative criticism: “if you’ve read some of the criticism of NBC that has come since the announcement it is very clear that some of the critics just don’t want to be confronted with Republican voices or conservative arguments. So there is that. And that’s bad. We should want to have a robust exchange between people who believe different things.”
Then Hayes agreed with the anti-Trump feelings: “But I agree with what’s been said here. I mean, that’s not what Ronna McDaniel is doing. That’s not what she’s been doing. And she has huge credibility problems, not because she’s been a partisan spinner on behalf of the Republican Party, but because she not only presided but directed, drove, the Q-Anonization of the Republican Party during her tenure.”
Hayes failed to put Psaki’s hiring on the table.
It concluded with Todd bizarrely claiming he always cared about “ideological diversity” on his show. He did??
TODD: Look, it is important for this network and for always to have a wide aperture, okay, and covering voters that have disparate beliefs. Having ideological diversity on this panel is something I prided myself on. We take – you and I both took plenty of grief when you have ideological and political diversity. I think all of us in mainstream media do a terrible job sometimes of geographic diversity and all this stuff. But I sort of call into question and sometimes people think they understand the politics of this country when they’re sort of in a very, very, very blue city. You know, this is a Washington operative who I don’t think is going to bring the network what they think it wants to bring to the network. I understand the motivation, but this execution I think was poor.
Then Welker turned to a liberal-bubble interview with former Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer, where she wanted to know all about preserving abortion rights and putting Trump in jail. If it’s Sunday, it’s a liberal bubble on Meet the Press.