When Rachel Maddow started her show on MSNBC on Monday, she told NBC News that they should stop working with Ronna McDaniel, who was hired by the network as a paid political expert.
The fact that Ms. McDaniel works for NBC News is hard for me to understand, Maddow said. “And I hope they’ll change their minds.”
Monday, some of the most pointed comments made by MSNBC hosts about NBC News were about her. They were criticizing the choice to hire McDaniel. Several hosts had parts where they questioned McDaniel’s credibility.
The NBCUniversal News Group includes both MSNBC and NBC News.
And Maddow didn’t like how McDaniel stuck by former President Donald Trump even though he wouldn’t accept the results of the 2020 election. People say that the former head of the RNC worked with Trump to put pressure on Michigan election officials not to declare the 2020 presidential election there.
Also, Maddow said that a free press shouldn’t be scared. She said, “We don’t take it personally when they attack us or say they want to put us on trial and kill us for treason.”
“So I want to join my coworkers at MSNBC and NBC News who have spoken out strongly against our company hiring someone who has not only attacked us as journalists but is also working to destroy our government,” she said of McDaniel. “Someone who is still trying to get people to believe that elections don’t really work.” that the last race wasn’t really over. that the American elections are rigged.”
McDaniel didn’t say anything in public on Monday.
Maddow said that when MSNBC staff heard about McDaniel’s hiring on Friday, they “unanimously and instantly expressed outrage.” However, she said, the leaders of the cable network “heard us, understood, and changed course.”
Maddow said, “We were told very clearly that Ronna McDaniel will not be on our air and will not be on MSNBC.”
Early Monday morning, Deadline reported that Rashida Jones, President of MSNBC, told staff that it would be up to each show to decide if they wanted to book McDaniel. A person who knows how the leaders of the cable network think said Jones made it clear that shows always have editorial control and that news can change how guests are booked.
There has been “a level since in other parts of the company to muddy that up in the press and make that seem like that’s not what happened at MSNBC,” Maddow said. She wanted to explain what she thought MSNBC executives said about McDaniel not being on the cable network’s air. I promise you that’s what happened at MSNBC.
Late Monday night, both NBC News and MSNBC refused to say anything.
The host of MSNBC’s “The ReidOut,” Joy Reid, said that McDaniel’s relationship with Trump “is not about having Republicans on” NBC News platforms or “fairness and balance.”
Reid said that her hiring before the 2024 election, when Trump is likely to be the Republican candidate, “is giving in to an autocrat ahead of time by saying, ‘Yes, we will take your apparatchik and let them be elevated and platform with us, with journalists.'”
Nicolle Wallace, host of MSNBC’s “Deadline: White House” and former head of communications for the White House under President George W. Bush, said McDaniel’s appearance would give rise to “election deniers.”
“What we’ve also told election deniers is that they can do that on our airwaves, and they can do that as one of us, as a full-fledged NBC News employee, as a paid contributor to our sacred airwaves,” Wallace said. Wallace was critical of the party under Trump.
MSNBC’s “Morning Joe” co-hosts Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski said earlier Monday that they would not invite McDaniel to be a guest.
“Just to be clear,” Brzezinski told the viewers, “we think NBC News should look for conservative Republican voices to add balance to their election coverage.” “But it should be conservative Republicans, not someone who used her power to say that the election wasn’t fair,”
“And we hope that NBC will change its mind,” she said.
McDaniel went on “Meet the Press” on Sunday, which was her first time in public since she quit as head of the RNC this month.
It was announced weeks before McDaniel’s appearance on “Meet the Press” that she was there for a news interview. The show’s moderator, Kristen Welker, told the viewers that her visit was planned.
Welker asked McDaniel if she was made to step down as head of the RNC, a job she had held for seven years.
Trump and Lara Trump are the new chairs of the RNC. “He wanted me to step down and wanted Michael Whatley and Lara Trump to come in,” McDaniel said.
In the interview, McDaniel said something different from Trump: “I do not think people who did violent things on January 6 should be freed.”
McDaniel also said that President Joe Biden won the 2020 election “fair and square” and that Biden is the real president.
Chuck Todd, Chief Political Analyst for NBC News, didn’t like that she was on the show later in the show because she was a paid guest.
“Now she works for NBC News and gets paid.” “I don’t know if any of the answers she gave you were because she didn’t want to break her contract,” Todd told Welker in the group discussion that followed the McDaniel interview. “She wants us to think that she spoke for the RNC when the RNC paid her to do so. So she still needs to deal with problems with her trustworthiness.
Carrie Budoff Brown, NBC News’s senior vice president of politics, announced McDaniel’s job and said she would “support our leading coverage by providing an insider’s perspective on national politics and the future of the Republican Party—which she led through some of the most turbulent and challenging moments in political history.”
The announcement said, “NBC News has a history of serving its audience through reporting that reflects and examines the diverse perspectives of American voters.” It also named other political analysts at the network who have different points of view, such as Ben Rhodes, who was President Barack Obama’s speechwriter and deputy national security adviser, and Marc Short, who was Vice President Mike Pence’s chief of staff.
Michael Steele, who used to be chair of the RNC, became a political analyst on MSNBC after his term as chair finished in 2011. He co-hosts a show on the network on the weekends right now. Jen Psaki, who was Biden’s White House press secretary, has been on MSNBC since 2022 and also leads a show there.