NBC News is facing an internal and external backlash over its hiring of former Republican National Committee chair Ronna McDaniel as a paid contributor given her past support of Donald Trump’s election claims.
On Friday, the network was announced that McDaniel would be joining the network to offer election year analysis across NBC News platforms, including NBC News Now and MSNBC.
McDaniel appeared on NBC News’ Meet the Press this morning for a sometimes contentious sit down interview with moderator Kristen Welker. Welker had told viewers that the interview was scheduled weeks before it was announced that McDaniel was joining the network. “This will be a news interview, and I was not involved in her hiring,” Welker said.
During the interview, McDaniel indicated that she disagreed with Trump’s pledge to pardon rioters who stormed the Capitol on January 6th. She also said that she believes that Joe Biden was elected president “fair and square.” But Welker pressed McDaniel on her past refusal to say that Biden was legitimately elected, running a clip from an interview she gave to Chris Wallace on CNN in July.
“I don’t think he won it fair,” McDaniel said in that interview.
Later on Meet the Press, Chuck Todd, the former moderator of the show and NBC News’ chief political analyst, criticized the network as he took part in a panel. He told Welker that “I think our bosses owe you an apology for putting you in this situation.”
Todd said, “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 her. 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?”
Todd praised Welker for doing “a good job of exposing I think many of the contradictions” in McDaniel’s comments.
Todd added, “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. That’s where you begin here. And so, when NBC made the decision to give her NBC News’ credibility, you gotta 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, sometimes it’s access to an individual. And we can have a journalistic ethics debate about it. I’m willing to have that debate.”
Todd went on to say that “if you told me we were hiring or as a technical adviser to the Republican Convention, I think that would be certainly defensible. If you told me we’re talking to her but let’s let’s see how she does in some interviews and maybe vet her with actual journalists inside the network to see if it’s a two way, what she can bring the network. Unfortunately, this interview is always going to be looked through the prism of, who is she speaking for?”
Todd said later, “I don’t think it’s 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.”
But MSNBC President Rashida Jones has addressed McDaniel’s hiring to staffers, assuring them that it would be up to individual shows to decide whether to book her, according to a source familiar with the situation. The Wall Street Journal reported on Saturday that a number of anchors and producers expressed concerns internally over McDaniel.