Inside and outside the network, objections were raised immediately when NBC News hired a Republican Party boss who's slammed the news media and supported Donald Trump's efforts to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election. On Sunday, Ronna McDaniel was confronted with those criticisms, live, in her first NBC appearance as a political analyst on the flagship Meet the Press, the Wall Street Journal reports. "There's a reason why there's a lot of journalists at NBC News uncomfortable with this," former host Chuck Todd said after McDaniel had left.
Moderator Kristen Welker told the audience she was going to conduct a news interview of McDaniel—who, Todd said, had refused to be interviewed by NBC for years when she was chair of the Republican National Committee. Pressed on the 2020 election, which she repeatedly has said was rigged, McDaniel told Welker she disagreed with Trump's claim of fraud, per the Washington Post. "When you're the RNC chair, you kind of take one for the whole team, right? Now I get to be a little bit more myself," McDaniel answered. She said President Biden won and is "the legitimate president."
The panel was not swayed. "I have no idea whether any answer she gave to you was because she didn't want to mess up her contract," Todd told Welker. Kimberly Atkins Stohr, a Boston Globe columnist, said McDaniel "habitually lied" while serving as RNC chair, so her "credibility was shot." In announcing the hire, the network said McDaniel, who acknowledged Sunday that Trump pushed her out of the RNC job, would appear on "all NBC News platforms." That caused an uproar among MSNBC staffers, and executives for the cable network have spent the weekend calling anchors to assure them there are no plans to book McDaniel on their shows. MSNBC also faced criticism for hiring former Biden press secretary Jen Psaki, among others. (More NBC News stories.)
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