The *really* hard (and important) question the Ronna McDaniel debacle raises for the media

Both sides?

It’s easy, in hindsight, to dunk on NBC News’ decision to bring on former Republican National Committee Chair Ronna Romney McDaniel.

McDaniel had been complicit (at least at some level) in Donald Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election — as well as his continued insistence that the race had been stolen. (It had not.)

She had badmouthed NBC personalities (and the network more broadly) as “fake news.”

While it might have been hard to predict the national uproar that her hiring occasioned, it was not hard to see that McDaniel was always going to be a controversial hire for a mainstream media network.

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(In case you have been on another planet for the last 24 hours, NBC announced it would part ways with McDaniel on Tuesday afternoon. McDaniel is seeking legal representation to ensure she is paid the full $600,000(!) she is owed by the network.)

Now, look. I get the tendency to say “HOW THE HELL COULD NBC HAVE DONE THIS?” I do. Truly.

At the same time, I also understand their thinking. It goes like this: Donald Trump is the Republican nominee for president. Polls suggest he has, at least, a 50-50 chance of winning the White House again. We need people on our airwaves who can offer insight into how he thinks — and what he will do if he is elected.

In a memo announcing the McDaniel hire, Carrie Budoff Brown, who runs NBC’s political coverage, sounded almost exactly that note.

“It couldn’t be a more important moment to have a voice like Ronna’s on the team,” Brown said, adding that McDaniel would bring “an insider’s perspective on national politics and the future of the Republican Party.”

Again, it’s easy to dunk on Brown. But I actually think the decision to hire McDaniel (and the subsequent decision to get rid of her) raises a deeper question for mainstream media outlets: How do you represent the views of the tens of millions of people who support Donald Trump on your airwaves?

Paul Farhi, a former media writer at the Washington Post, put this question better than I have in a tweet on Tuesday:

This is it — exactly.

One of the most fundamental mandates of the mainstream media is to make sure that they put voices on their airwaves (or in their print pages or whatever) that represent the broad views of the two major political parties in this country.

While I understand the criticism of “both sides” journalism, I think, generally speaking, it is a good thing to be willing to platform divergent but representative perspectives.

And, truthfully, this system has worked just fine for quite some time. Twenty five years ago, it was not hard to find a smart Democratic voice who would say that Al Gore was going to win the 2000 election for these five reasons. And, on the other side, a savvy Republican voice who could say the same about George W. Bush.

Democrats might not have liked what the Republican had to say — or agreed with ANY of it — but there was a broad sense that this was fair play. That the media, broadly, was doing its job.

Donald Trump changed that — particularly after 2020. Here’s why.

Trump made election denialism a litmus test for Republicans. Either you believed (or at least were willing to say) that the 2020 election was stolen or you weren’t. If you believed the former, you were an upstanding member of the Trump army. If you believed the latter, you were a RINO who needed to be cast out of the party.

Trump, by the way, is still doing this. Witness this story from the Washington Post that published last night:

Those seeking employment at the Republican National Committee after a Trump-backed purge of the committee this month have been asked in job interviews if they believe the 2020 election was stolen, according to people familiar with the interviews, making the false claim a litmus test of sorts for hiring.

In recent days, Trump advisers have quizzed multiple employees who had worked in key 2024 states about their views on the last presidential election, according to people who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe private interviews and discussions. The interviews have been conducted mostly virtually, as the prospective future employees are based in key swing states.

“Was the 2020 election stolen?” one prospective employee recalled being asked in a room with two top Trump advisers.

What this Trump loyalty test means, in practical terms, is that the ONLY way you can say you speak for him (or understand the interests and goals of his movement) is to say that the election of 2020 was stolen.

If you “admit” the election was free and fair, you are immediately not a part of the Trump universe — and not able, in any credible way, to speak about the former president and his campaign. And, not only that, but you are a hated Never Trumper — someone who, in the mind of the party base, is no better than a Democrat.

Which is a MASSIVE problem for the media. Because an outlet like NBC is confronted with two basic options if they are looking for Republican voices:

1. People who are ultra MAGA partisans — like, say, Stephen Miller — who believe that the election was stolen and will use their airtime to say just that.

2. People who are (or at least were) Republicans but loathe Trump. George Conway. Steve Schmidt. You get the idea.

Putting the first sort of person on TV (and McDaniel, I think falls into that category) is to platform someone who is lying about a fundamental pillar of our democracy — the safety and sanctity of an American election.

Putting the second sort of person on TV (or quoting them etc.) is to give voice not to Trump’s following but rather to people who actively oppose the former president — regardless of their technical party affiliation.

The answer to this conundrum for many of you is simple: Just don’t put ANY pro-Trump voices on air. These are people who don’t deserve the attention or publicity. Their views are noxious and dangerous.

Which I get! Here’s the problem I have with that view: 74 million of our fellow Americans voted for Donald Trump in 2020. They knew what he was. What he represented. And they voted for him anyway.

To dismiss ALL of those people as ignorant cretins and racists seems to be a major oversimplification — and, at some level, an abdication of the mission of journalism.

The goal of which, I think, is to try to understand the way Americans think about themselves, their lives and their leaders. We may not always like these views. But it is worth understanding (or trying to understand them) as a way to better grasp where a large chunk of the country is coming from.

This doesn’t mean we shouldn’t leaven facts and context in when reporting these views. We should! That has always been a role for the media — long before Donald Trump existed in the political space.

To write off one of the two major political parties in this country doesn’t sit right with me. At the same time, platforming people who have achieved prominence in the party by spouting a lie about the last presidential election also seems wrong.

I wish I could offer a workable solution for my fellow journalists. I would if I have one.

Do you have ideas of how the media can navigate this? Or is it fundamentally un-navigable?