AP Photo/Alex Brandon
Former RNC Chair and now ex-NBC News contributor Ronna McDaniel is getting a ton of coverage across the cable news dial. And while her demise is an extraordinary story for media reporters and industry insiders who read Mediaite, it is not in the interest of the typical cable news viewer. The partisan jousting is just one of the many reasons why so many Americans sigh when asked about the state of the media industry, and exposes a serious problem in the cable news industry specifically.
McDaniel first appeared on NBC News on Sunday. Then, after 24 hours of performative pearl-clutching by MSNBC’s top talent, NBCU News Group Chairman Cesar Conde sent a note to the entire company on Tuesday night that didn’t just announce that McDaniel would no longer be a contributor, but also apologized for hiring such a controversial figure.
While Conde deserves a bit of credit for publicly admitting the mistake of hiring someone who had been part of former President Donald Trump’s scheme to put forth fake electors and continued to promote election denialism, the fact that his memo came out after public rebuke from top MSNBC talent, like Rachel Maddow, Joe Scarborough, Jen Psaki (and the rest), did little to dispel the notion that talent runs MSNBC, and not the executives who, impossibly, didn’t see this controversy coming.
In many ways, NBC brass did MSNBC talent an enormous favor: the self-own gave hosts on the left-leaning network the opportunity to call out the hire, proving their bona fides to loyal MSNBC viewers who tune in for “courageous and principled positions™” in the dark era of Trump. A more cynical take would say that the day-long meltdown over the hire was largely performative virtue signaling.
The Ronna debacle (Ronnacle?) wasn’t just covered breathlessly on MSNBC. CNN and Fox News also dedicated segment upon segment to it. CNN largely focused more on the curiosity of a competitor hiring someone who took part in and enabled Trump’s election denialism, while Fox News, well, went full Fox News.
Fox hosts pounced on the McDaniel ouster and blasted NBC leadership for letting their tail wag them into firing the former RNC chair. They have insisted that this is evidence MSNBC can’t handle a different point of view than their progressive programming. They have a point there, though Ronna McDaniel is not great evidence in support of it.
McDaniel was an immediate pariah at NBC not because she ran the RNC — in fact, another former RNC Chair, Michael Steele, is a regular co-host on the network. At issue is the fact that McDaniel enthusiastically embraced Trump’s baseless claim that the 2020 election was stolen. It was not. The lies about election fraud have done serious harm to our democracy. Full stop.
But here’s where Fox hosts are right: there is little appetite for MSNBC viewers to hear Republicans’ point of view, particularly now that Trump defines the current iteration of the GOP. The now former Republican voices one sees on MSNBC — Joe Scarborough, Michael Steele, Nicolle Wallace — are all in full resistance mode. Ironically, the quickest route for a political conversion for any Republican wannabe pundit is to put them on an MSNBC panel — they seem to get Democratic religion quickly.
Of course, the very same criticism in reverse can be leveled at Fox News, though Jessica Tarlov is a notable exception. And therein lies the problem that Ronna-gate has exposed. What this multi-day saga has done most of all is show how narrow the window is through which these partisan networks view the world. Diversity of thought isn’t welcomed. That’s become clear. And neither, really, is diversity of subject matter.
In MSNBC-world, the border isn’t really a big issue. In Fox-world, you’ll never hear about social justice topics — except as fodder for mockery. The partisan focus of cable news networks have only fueled the information siloes that drive polarization. Ideological purity tests for contributors only accelerate that ominous trend.
The whole thing is rotten and it comes from a rot from within outlets that reward divisive partisanship with air time and massively lucrative contracts. Ronna McDaniel was vilified for saying whatever people paid her to say? One could make that same reasonable allegation about many talking heads on cable news — ust look at the converted Republican machers on MSNBC today!
A pro tip to cable news executives, programmers, talent, and producers: It’s time to broaden both your ideological horizons and your on-air rosters — or risk losing your viewers to a place like TikTok, which does narrowcast niche far better than cable news ever could.
This is an opinion piece. The views expressed in this article are those of just the author.
