Chuck Todd, Morning Joe Bemoaning Hiring Ronna McDaniel Underscores Media Double Standard
NBC News hired former Republican National Committee chairwoman Ronna McDaniel as a paid contributor, a move the network announced last week.
On-air personalities at the network have since used NBC platforms to criticize the move.
Former "Meet the Press" moderator Chuck Todd returned to "Meet the Press" on Sunday, demanding his bosses apologize for hiring McDaniel.
"I think our bosses owe you an apology for putting you in this situation," Chuck Todd told Kristen Welker, after an interview with McDaniel.
"When NBC made the decision to give her NBC News’ credibility, you got to ask yourself, what does she bring NBC News?" Todd added.
"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 that. And I’m willing to have that debate. And if you told me we were hiring her 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 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."
The hosts of "Morning Joe," the flagship morning program on MSNBC, echoed the same sentiment as Todd. Joe Scarborough added that McDaniel would not appear on the show as a guest.
"To be clear, we believe NBC News should seek out conservative Republican voices to provide balance in their election coverage," said co-host Mika Brzezinski.
"But it should be conservative Republicans, not a person who used her position of power to be an anti-democracy election denier."
Got it.
For those keeping track – no, Todd and "Morning Joe" did not publicly condemn NBC for hiring former Biden press secretary Jen Psaki or former Kamala Harris staffer Symone Sanders-Townsend, two women as far to the left as McDaniel is to the right.
Despite what Brzezinski says, it's not "balance" that NBC hosts seek. In their opinion, one side of the political spectrum is wrong, and the other is simply political.
Most NBC hosts and journalists deem the opinions of Democrats as subjective, but the opinions of Republicans as objectively and morally minacious.
Lead NBC anchor Lester Holt admitted so in 2021:
"I think it’s become clear that fairness is overrated ... the idea that we should always give two sides equal weight and merit does not reflect the world we find ourselves in."
Of course, NBC could justify such a disparate view of the two parties if one were found perpetually lying and the other was not. But that's not the case.
In fact, NBC/MSNBC were lead promulgators of several lies perpetuated by the Left – be it the Russia Hoax, dismissing the Hunter Biden laptop story as Russian propaganda, or the zoonotic origin of Covid-19.
NBC News is not the NBC News of old.
A credible news outlet calls out both sides for their cartoonish fallacies. A credible news outlet holds the voices of each side accountable.
The faces of a credible news network do not bemoan the hiring of one Republican figure from Washington and welcome with open arms several Democratic operatives.
Chuck Todd told the press in 2021 that he "doesn't see a liberal bias in the media." He wishes the press would defend itself against said accusations more adamantly.
"The Republicans have been running on, 'There's a liberal bias in the media,'" Todd said. "If you say something long enough, there are liberals who say there's a liberal bias in the media when you see polling now."
"The Republicans have subsumed all of this, and it's turned into this. We should have fought back better in the mainstream media. We shouldn't have accepted the premise that there was liberal bias. We should have defended [ourselves]."
It will be more challenging for Todd and other NBC cronies to defend their political objectivity after their recent tirades regarding Ronna McDaniel.