From Politico:
Excerpting from CNN:
And, excerpting from the Washington Post:
The uproar inside NBC over Ronna McDaniel’s hiring spilled into Monday morning as more of the network’s top personalities denounced the deal with the former RNC chair, escalating a battle over the relationship between powerful media companies and Donald Trump’s loyalists.
The decision to hire McDaniel, which was unanimously supported by top network executives, has already divided and destabilized one of America’s most storied news organizations, with internal dismay flaring on text chains and Slack channels since the deal was announced late last week.
Excerpting from CNN:
Stephen Hayes, editor of the conservative online outlet The Dispatch, added that McDaniel 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 QAnonization of the Republican Party during her tenure.”
And, excerpting from the Washington Post:
“When you’re the RNC chair you, kind of, take one for the whole team, right?” she said. “Now I get to be, a little bit, more myself, right?”
This came as she was distancing herself from Trump’s rhetoric celebrating those arrested for the riot at the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021 — celebrations to which she said she objected. But when Welker later pointed to McDaniel’s new claim that President Biden had been elected “fair and square” to ask why viewers should trust her, the former party chair insisted that she was being consistent.
“I am not changing my tune,” McDaniel said. “This is where I have been.”
Of course there’s no reason to grant McDaniel a baseline assumption of honesty, much less consistency. But this top-line conflict between past and current statements obscures the real issue.
McDaniel did say Biden won “fair and square,” yes, but also insisted that “it’s fair to say there were problems in 2020.”
She offered an example.
“When you have states like Pennsylvania go from 260,000 mail ballots in 2016 to 2.6 million,” McDaniel said, “saying, ‘You know what? When you get rid of ID for all mail-in ballots,’ that’s a concern. We should all be concerned about the care, custody, integrity of every ballot.”
Welker responded to this claim by saying that the Supreme Court “didn’t take up concerns about the election results in Pennsylvania and the slew of other states.” But she could have pointed out that everything McDaniel said was easily explained — and a reiteration of the same strain of election denial that NBC News and any other legitimate news outlets should strive to uproot.
Pennsylvania saw a surge in mail-in ballots partly because of the coronavirus pandemic, of course, as anyone who was a sentient adult before 2020 should recognize. But it is also because, in 2019 — before the pandemic — the Republican-led legislature in the state passed Act 77, a law expanding the ability of residents to vote absentee.
Kudos to those who are repudiating this hiring.
