Yesterday I wrote that NBC was smart to hire Ronna McDaniel.
"Peter, we love you but this is crazy. She can be a guest. But her hiring as a commentator suggests she has more authority, intelligence, credibility and honesty than she has."
"I think you have misplaced your priorities here, Peter. If I hire someone, it's rightly assumed I am vouching for their integrity."
I got lots of comments like these.
Let me explain.
An ongoing theme of this blog is that the message cannot be disentangled from the messenger.Whois saying things andhowit is said are huge parts of the received communication. Indeed, when I am being bold, I claim thatnearly all received communication in political speech is from thewho and how, and that denoted, literal words are nearly irrelevant.
I use the exaggerated example of Joe Biden or Clint Eastwood. No matter how superbly either of them acted the part of Juliet in Shakespeare's play, they could not do it persuasively. They don't look the part. I cite the response to Biden's recent State of the Union speech. All of the attention was on Biden's tone of confidence, his strength of voice, and his apparent clarity of thought -- not what he said.
Ronna McDaniel would not be hired to be a source of truth. She would be a paid contributor to play a specific role -- the role of Republican quisling and collaborator with Trump, a person who corruptly enabled Trump to spread falsehoods. She would be the semi-reformed villain.
Regular viewers of NBC know that Eugene Robinson is on multiple news panels. Every time the panel is introduced we hear that Eugene Robinson is a Pulitzer-Prize-winning reporter with The Washington Post. For all I know, he won it 30 years ago for a heartwarming human-interest story about a lost puppy, but that doesn't matter. He won a Pulitzer Prize, so he is presented as a highly-qualified serious reporter for a major newspaper.
Ronna McDaniel would be introduced as a former Trump enabler who participated in the gaslighting of America, who participated in the fake elector plot in Michigan, and who, even with that effort to undermine democracy, was insufficiently loyal to Trump to keep her job. I can imagine her on the panel next to Eugene Robinson. He gets his intro. Then:
" . . . and Ronna McDaniel, former head of the Republican National Committee, who in that role echoed Trump's false claims of a stolen election and who participated with him in the Michigan fake-elector plot -- actions she now recognizes were lies, but done 'for the team' during her role as RNC head. She was fired by Trump and joins us to give a Republican perspective."
She would be positioned as an unreliable narrator. Because she is a woman and a professed Christian, NBC would need to exercise some care. If she looked like a punching bag, particularly for male news hosts, it would send an unseemly, counter-productive look of misogyny -- a man humiliating a woman when he asks her tough questions. She claims the identity of Christian mother. This could look like a concerted NBC effort to pick on and humiliate "deplorable" Christians, if hosts aren't careful. Avoid that, too.
Her place on a panel, positioned as a thrust-from-the-Trump-cult Republican, would be to articulate that some of what Trump did and does is criminal. Anti-democratic. Lawless. Shockingly crude as regards women. Dishonest. And that McDaniel, a professional Republican partisan, rejects some parts of Trump-ism, although she also minimizes that because she is a Trump apologist at heart. MAGA Trump-cultists are a lost cause. But there are Republican and Republican-leaning voters up for grabs. They are offended by Trump. Those are the people NBC would be trying to reach with McDaniel trying to unpack Trump, picking between the legal and illegal.
McDaniel might not last long at NBC if she were forced to confront Trump's most lawless behavior and lies. She would probably quit. She would not like being introduced as a dishonest enabler of an authoritarian criminal. She would be, as Trump celebrated in a Truth Social post, politically homeless -- in Never-never land:
She would not be homeless for long. Liz Cheney, Adam Kinzinger, and McDaniel's uncle, Mitt Romney, all drew lines in the sand and would not tolerate Trump at his worst. Ronna McDaniel didn't. Trump fired her.
The easy thing for her to do would have been to work for a few weeks at NBC, realize she looked terrible being described as having a history of partisan lies while trying to defend Trump, and negotiate her way out of the contract.
Then she would go to Fox, where she can delight audiences by complaining about her treatment by the liberal media.
Do you think it proper for a company to hire someone so it can publicly humiliate them? Your case for NBC's hiring Ronna McDaniel hinges on her being shamed every time she's introduced rather than for what she can legitimately contribute to NBC News. You realize that she probably won't like that and will soon quit. But I wouldn't respect folks who'd do that to an employee. It's rude, it's crass, it's cheap. It would put NBC on a par with The Apprentice, which drew its appeal from Trump's humiliating people. In fairness to NBC, I doubt if it planned to treat McDaniel as you imagined it would.
I agree with you, Peter. We need to hear the views of everyone in order to be well informed. It doesn't mean we agree with everything they say.