Not just journalists anymore.
A few Sundays back, viewers of ABC News’s “This Week With George Stephanopolous” were treated to a comical journalistic exercise that never would have happened 40 years ago.
Stephanopolous, a former Clinton White House communications director, was interviewing paid members of his regular panel discussion, the former acting chair of the Democratic National Committee (Donna Brazile) and the former chair of the Republican National Committee (Reince Priebus) about the ethics of NBC News hiring former Republican National Committee chair Ronna McDaniel.
Let’s all step away from the media vehicle for a moment, shall we? Put down your remote so we can see your hands.
McDaniel, you may recall, was hired by NBC to appear on various NBC News programs, including those on MSNBC. Lawrence O’Donnell, host of MSNBC’s “The Last Word” (and the former staff director for the Senate Finance Committee under Democratic New York Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan) said McDaniel was a “Trump liar.”
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True enough.
Meanwhile, on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe,” featuring former GOP Rep. Joe Scarborough and his wife, actual journalist Mika Brzezinski (who, for partisan fun, is the daughter of Democratic administration stalwart National Security Adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski), said that they would never have McDaniel on their show, either. Hmmph.
Golly, the list of former political people now or formerly on network political chat shows goes on and on. CNN’s Chris Cuomo (you may have heard of his father and brother, both governors of New York) comes to mind. He got crossways with CNN when he helped his brother build a case against women who claimed Gov. Andrew Cuomo engaged in inappropriate behavior towards them. He’s not on CNN now, he’s up in some odd corner of your smart TV.
At NBC’s “Meet The Press,” Tim Russert held court for years as the host, after his tenure as a top aide to Sen. Moynihan and Gov. Mario Cuomo. Former Speaker Thomas P. “Tip” O’Neill aide Chris Matthews, San Franciscans of a certain age may recall, was a political columnist for the San Francisco Examiner, and then later served as an MSNBC host.
A former NBC host turned politician (odd, that) blasted NBC.
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“These sick degenerates over at MSDNC are really running NBC, and there seems nothing (Comcast) chairman Brian Roberts can do about it.” That was former President Donald Trump’s tweet, if you missed the wind-up to the joke.
Without a doubt, NBC (network home of “The Apprentice,” featuring genial host Trump) was the most responsible for the rise of our former president/authoritarian. We’re not saying that was the NBC endgame, but they gave this coup coup traitor lots of oxygen.
Former TrumpWhite House Chief of Staff Mick Mulvaney had a cozy little TV gig with CBS News as well. Wonder if he ever lied? Former Trump Communications Director Allyssa Farah Griffin parlayed her comm skills into a CNN gig, and then as a co-host of “The View.”
Jen Psaki, a former Biden White House press secretary, is now on MSNBC. After a short period of time as a “political analyst,” she has her own show already. After years of toiling as political analyst/sane Republican, former Maryland Lt. Gov. Michael Steele (and, for the record, the ex-chair of the Republican National Committee) also has his own show on MSNBC.
Where, oh where is the line between the propriety of hiring Ronna McDaniel and the propriety of hiring all these other former politicos? Um, well, let me tell you a story about a long-ago time in a far-away place.
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Prior to 1980, there was no CNN. There was no MSNBC. There was no Fox News. There was CBS News, NBC News, and ABC News. Oh, and PBS.
I can tell you one thing about that distant land. There were no former Republican or Democratic national chairs being paid by networks. They had them on, of course, and that’s fine. They were questioned by other journalists, so these folks were on the sharp end of the stick, not the dull end.
Growing up in the 1960s and 1970s, we watched Lawrence Spivak on NBC’s “Meet The Press,” George Herman and, later, Bob Schieffer on CBS’s “Face the Nation,” and Bob Clark on ABC’s “Issues and Answers” (later “This Week with David Brinkley”). They were hosted by trained, longtime journalists. The questioners on these shows were almost invariably major print reporters of their era, such as The Washington Post’s David S. Broder and Chicago Daily News columnist Peter Lisagor. They were almost all white and male.
When cable came in, networks got better and better about female and minority representation. As the cable shows shifted to a 24-hour news service format, there was a shortage of actual journalists to fill that air time.
Then they started bringing radio call-in hosts in as guests. That wouldn’t have happened on “Face the Nation,” baby. One radio guy I knew personally had endless exposure on CNN’s “Larry King Live” (a call-in show) because he was good at running his mouth at high speed. That was the beginning of the end. Extremely minor media figures and political hacks became “political analysts.”
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Here’s the end: there’s no journalism/politics revolving door now, it’s a wormhole. It’s just People Who Are On TV, imbued with instant credibility for no reason other than, in the words of Howard Beale, “You’re on television, stupid.”
That worked out well for Trump. Not so good for our fragile democracy.
Jack Ohman is a Pulitzer Prize-winning cartoonist and columnist.
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