Republican National Committee Chairwoman Ronna McDaniel speaks at The Venetian Resort Las Vegas in October 2023.
Let’s imagine, at least for a few paragraphs, that I decided it would be a good idea for this newspaper to hire former Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo to write a monthly freelance column on issues surrounding the topic of gender in the workplace. And I decided to announce it in a memo to staff that said, “It couldn’t be a more important moment to have a voice like the former governor’s on the team,” since we’re in the middle of an election year in which one of the two major-party candidates is, like Cuomo, a Queens boy and former elected official who has vociferously denied multiple allegations of sexual misconduct.
It is not unreasonable to imagine that this news would prompt criticism, perhaps even outrage, from Times Union staffers as well as many readers. One would imagine that Chris Churchill might use his thrice-weekly column to note that Cuomo’s freelance assignment involved issues on which the former governor should not be viewed as Mr. Credibility, and that — despite his immense respect for me as a journalist and a human being — Churchill had begun to suspect that I had “lost (my) ... mind.”
Let us then imagine that, having read Chris' column and spat coffee all over my kitchen counter, I reached out via text message to a few of Cuomo’s former flunkies and devoted loyalists and gauged their willingness to launch a campaign to stand up for my hire and rebut Churchill’s take, maybe on the many social media platforms where Team Cuomo are such busy bees.
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What would happen if this communication became widely known around the newsroom, and throughout the Times Union’s readership? Do you think I’d still be able to function as the Times Union’s editor for even one more day? Do you think I’d deserve to?
If your answer is “yes,” the current management of NBC News needs your support.
The scenario described above closely analogizes how that storied organization created and then tried to resist the suck-tide of criticism that resulted from its announcement that it had hired Ronna McDaniel, the recently deposed chair of the Republican National Committee, to serve as a political analyst for its chat shows.
Less than a week later — after a steady escalation in public statements by NBC on-air talents such as Chuck Todd and Rachel Maddow — the network announced it was parting ways with McDaniel, who according to Politico had expected to make $600,000 from her two-year contract. As I write this, the fates of that moolah and the careers of several NBC/Universal News Group executives, up to and including chairman Cesar Conde, are in question.
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If those people thought they could get away with hiring McDaniel — a willing participant in former President Donald J. Trump’s efforts to spread bogus conspiracy theories about the 2020 election, and someone who slimed NBC journalists to curry favor with Trump — it was likely due to precedent. TV news has a distressing habit of hiring partisan shills not for their truth-telling style but for their ability to defend their ideological buddies with sufficient on-air elan. Critics of the McDaniel hire were making a category error by holding NBC to the standards of journalism when the proper lens (literally) was the same one that made Trump himself a star on NBC's “The Apprentice”: This was reality TV.
In the summer of 2016, CNN faced similar criticism for hiring Corey Lewandowski as a commentator just weeks after he had been fired as Trump’s campaign manager. Numerous media journalists including CNN’s own Brian Stelter noted that Lewandowski — who just months before had faced a misdemeanor battery charge for allegedly manhandling a female journalist — couldn’t really be expected to talk frankly about anything having to do with Trump since he had signed the developer-candidate’s standard nondisclosure/non-disparagement agreement. In the world of journalism, this would be disqualifying, but in world of reality TV? Why, you might as well dismiss a female contestant on “The Bachelor” for saying nasty things about her rivals: That’s what the producers have cast her for.
Good journalists are less easy to cast for a particular role, since they’re more likely to share facts and findings as opposed to merely dispensing hot takes that tickle one side and rile up the other. It has been said that facts "don’t care about your feelings,” and it’s true — but political shills absolutely do care about your feelings. It’s their whole business model.
Defenders of the McDaniel hire pointed to the numerous figures who jumped from working in politics to covering it — a list that includes TV legends such as Tim Russert (a former aide to Gov. Mario Cuomo) and Bill Moyers to George Stephanopoulos and Jen Psaki. It’s a fair point, although none of those individuals ever assisted in an effort to overturn a presidential election. McDaniel’s 2024 odor is similar to the one that emanated from former Nixon press secretary Ron Ziegler in the late 1970s, when he was steering clear of cameras and making his living in the more placid field of international consulting.
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Ziegler later claimed he had never lied — or not quite — even as he had allowed himself to be used as a stooge for Nixon's bent advisers; in later life. he maintained a suitably low profile shilling for chain drug stores and truck stops.
But those were different times.
Seiler: Hire journalists, not shills
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06.04.2024
Republican National Committee Chairwoman Ronna McDaniel speaks at The Venetian Resort Las Vegas in October 2023.
Let’s imagine, at least for a few paragraphs, that I decided it would be a good idea for this newspaper to hire former Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo to write a monthly freelance column on issues surrounding the topic of gender in the workplace. And I decided to announce it in a memo to staff that said, “It couldn’t be a more important moment to have a voice like the former governor’s on the team,” since we’re in the middle of an election year in which one of the two major-party candidates is, like Cuomo, a Queens boy and former elected official who has vociferously denied multiple allegations of sexual misconduct.
It is not unreasonable to imagine that this news would prompt criticism, perhaps even outrage, from Times Union staffers as well as many readers. One would imagine that Chris Churchill might use his thrice-weekly column to note that Cuomo’s freelance assignment involved issues on which the former governor should not be viewed as Mr. Credibility, and that — despite his immense respect for me as a journalist and a human being — Churchill had begun to suspect that I had “lost (my) ... mind.”
Let us then imagine that, having read Chris' column and spat coffee all over my kitchen counter, I reached out via text message to a few of Cuomo’s former flunkies and devoted loyalists and gauged their........
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