NBC's McDaniel Ouster Is A Lesson In Media Politics And Double Standards

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The minor uprising among NBC News staffers over the network’s hiring of former Republican National Committee Chair Ronna Romney McDaniel is over. Bowing to the unrest in the newsroom, and the greenroom, network brass and McDaniel have parted ways and we can all get back to work.

Because this is a story about the press-politics nexus, there has been more chin-pulling than usual about the McDaniel episode.

Some of it is legitimate. Some is just preening. Well, to be fair, the vast majority of it is preening. But worse for the TV chattering classes at 30 Rock and elsewhere, it was utterly myopic.

Politico’s Jack Shafer put together a partial list of current and former politicians, aides, speechwriters, press flacks and family members who’ve made the transition from making news to commenting on it. It’s quite a thing to behold, not the least of which is because it’s just a sample of how interlocked politics and media really are:

Setting aside the bevy of politicos hired over the years by the Fox News channel — Sarah Palin, Newt Gingrich, Rick Santorum, Mike Huckabee, Karl Rove, John Kasich, Dana Perino, Ben Carson, et al. — a migration path as reliable as that of the caribou has been trod to the networks by politicians, their aides, their speechwriters, and in one case political offspring: Diane Sawyer to CBS News and then ABC News; Chris Matthews to MSNBC; Joe Scarborough to MSNBC; Tim Russert to NBC News; Susan Molinari to CBS News; Mary Matalin to CNN; Bay Buchanan to CNN; Pat Buchanan to CNN; Paul Begala to CNN; Sarah Isgur to ABC News; Van Jones to CNN; Al Sharpton to MSNBC; Bill Bradley to CBS News; Dee Dee Myers to CNBC; Jennifer Granholm to CNN; David Axelrod to CNN; David Gergen to CNN; Donna Brazile to ABC News; Lawrence O’Donnell to MSNBC; Nicolle Wallace to MSNBC; Symone Sanders-Townsend to MSNBC; Jen Psaki to MSNBC; George Stephanopoulos to ABC News; Mick Mulvaney to CBS News; Corey Lewandowski to CNN; and many more, including nepo-baby Chelsea Clinton who, according to POLITICO, was paid a reported $600,000 a year by NBC News. And that’s just the shortlist.

Which is incredible. The bottom line: there is nothing new about hacks, flacks and has-beens moving from politics to major media. The outrage over McDaniel may be firmly lashed to her role as defender of all things Trump. But critics inside the NBC tent would be wise to look around and inventory their own colleagues. How many of them were once active, public members of Team Red or Team Blue?

Get back to me once that’s done, and maybe we can have a serious talk.

There’s another wrinkle to all of this that’s worth exploring.

It’s just as common for former professional athletes to go into broadcasting games once they retire from play. We usually don’t think twice about it because, in general, ex-jocks can add deep insight into the mechanics of the game.

One key reason we treat such transitions as natural is that once the player or coach gets in the booth, they stop being team members. And even when calling games for their former team, they aren’t cheerleaders.

One of the best who ever made the transition from field to broadcast booth: the late John Madden.  The former Oakland Raiders coach was loathed outside the team’s fanbase for a multitude of reasons. But as a broadcaster, Madden was beloved – even revered – as the guy who instructed America on the finer points of interior line play.

Some political activists have made such a transition. Former Reagan speechwriter Peggy Noonan at The Wall Street Journal, for one. The late William Safire (after a rough start) became a powerful voice on The New York Times editorial page.

But unlike ex-jocks, the vast majority of ex-politicos never stop cheering for their former team. If more made a clean break, focused on the blocking and tackling of political campaigns, the nuances of policy, and the give-and-take of legislating, we might have a better, more civil, more effective commentariat.  

That we don’t is a failure of the commentators themselves, who just can’t bring themselves to abandon their allegiance to the team.

The opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the positions of American Liberty News.

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