If Ronna McDaniel Is Beyond the Pale, NBC May Have Trouble Presenting ‘Diverse Viewpoints’
Two weeks after the 2020 presidential election, Ronna McDaniel, then chair of the Republican National Committee (RNC), let Rudy Giuliani, Donald Trump’s lawyer, hold a press conference at the RNC’s headquarters in Washington, D.C. During that bizarre presentation, Giuliani and Sidney Powell, another member of the Trump campaign’s “elite strike force team,” crystallized the craziness of the president’s stolen-election fantasy by describing a baroque international conspiracy that supposedly had delivered a fraudulent victory to Joe Biden.
On January 29, 2021, three weeks after angry Trump supporters who believed that fantasy invaded the U.S. Capitol as Congress was about to affirm Biden’s election, McDaniel expressed regret about hosting Giuliani’s clown show. “When I saw some of the things Sidney was saying, without proof, I certainly was concerned it was happening in my building,” she told The New York Times. “There are a whole host of issues we had to deal with: What is the liability of the RNC, if these allegations are made and [prove to be] unfounded?”
That incident reflects McDaniel’s ambiguous role in promoting Trump’s baseless claims of decisive election fraud in the two months prior to the Capitol riot. Her support for those claims, which stopped short of outright endorsement but nevertheless lent them credibility, was at the center of the complaints that yesterday persuaded NBC executives to abruptly rescind their decision to hire her as an on-air commentator.
As Reason‘s Robby Soave noted after several NBC and MSNBC personalities publicly objected to McDaniel’s gig, it is not at all unusual for news outlets to hire former party or White House officials. But McDaniel critics such as Chuck Todd, Joe Scarborough, and Rachel Maddow argued that giving her a forum on NBC was different from that standard practice because she had assisted Trump’s efforts to overturn the results of the 2020 election, undermining democracy by threatening the peaceful transfer of power.
McDaniel “was not the most aggressive or outlandish member of Mr. Trump’s team,” the Times notes. In fact, “she fell short of Mr. Trump’s demands and expectations,” prompting “calls from his allies and grass-roots activists to be far more aggressive.” But the Times adds that “a review of her record shows she was, at times, closely involved in and supportive of Mr. Trump’s legal and political maneuvering ahead of the violent attempt to block Congress from certifying Mr. Biden’s victory on Jan. 6.”
While that seems like an accurate assessment, NBC’s conclusion that McDaniel is beyond the pale raises questions about where exactly a network should draw that line when it tries to present a mix of political viewpoints. Given Trump’s domination of the Republican Party, finding former GOP officials who did not acquiesce in his increasingly desperate attempts to remain in office after he lost reelection may prove challenging. And if dissident Never Trumpers are the only acceptable on-air Republicans, news outlets like NBC will be presenting a highly skewed selection that does not reflect prevailing opinions within the party.
McDaniel’s public statements about fraud after the election were less extravagant than Trump’s but open to various interpretations. On November 6, the day before news organizations called the election for Biden, she said the RNC was looking into “irregularities” in four states, including Michigan. Four days later on Fox News, she cited a Politico poll finding that “70 percent of Republicans don’t have faith in the results of this election right now.” She suggested they were right to be skeptical:
It’s been rigged from the beginning—rigged from the laws that were being passed in the name of COVID to create a porous election, rigged in the sense that they kicked Republicans out of poll watching and observing. Why do
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