News media shouldn’t hire Trump’s former flunkies
On the night of Dec. 5, 2020, Jocelyn Benson and her 4-year-old son had just finished decorating their Detroit house for Christmas. Just as he was sitting down to watch “How the Grinch Stole Christmas,” Benson heard a growing ruckus outside.
The noises got louder and louder and eventually Benson could see there was a mob of dozens of protesters standing on her front lawn. Some were armed with guns.
They shouted obscenities. Some chanted on bullhorns. At least one person yelled “You’re murderers!” within earshot of her son’s room. Another: “Your neighbors will not get no sleep — you need to come out now!”
Benson was — and still is — Michigan’s secretary of state. A month before Donald Trump’s supporters descended on her property to harass and intimidate her family, the head of the Republican National Committee, Ronna McDaniel, went on Fox News to tell a national audience that the election results in Michigan may have been fraudulent. She accused Benson of being “dishonest,” and an election worker of trying to rig the election.
She said the RNC was pursuing “very serious” reports of “irregularities” in Michigan, and described “hundreds of witnesses who talk about being disenfranchised and being removed from counting centers.”
Even as Fox hosts pressed her for evidence that they hadn’t found — “There’s all kinds of stuff flying on the internet, but when we look into it, it doesn’t pan out” — she urged them to “be patient.”
Evidence of voter fraud in Michigan never appeared. But McDaniel’s baseless allegations against Michigan election workers and against Benson had already done what they were supposed to do: get Trump voters mad.
Mad enough that two months later they’d storm the U.S. Capitol, hoping to overturn a democratic election, shouting “Hang Mike Pence!” and “Where’s Nancy?” McDaniel shamefully called the violent insurrection “legitimate political discourse.”
Benson was hardly the only victim of Trump and McDaniel’s dangerous lies. State officials and election workers all over the country were targeted, all so that Trump could cling to power.
So, there’s well-deserved angst over the hiring of McDaniel, who resigned as head of the RNC, by NBC News, both inside its cable property MSNBC and among journalists everywhere. NBC quickly cut ties with McDaniel on Tuesday.
MSNBC’s top talent, including Chuck Todd, Rachel Maddow, and Joe Scarborough, as well as former CBS anchor Dan Rather, have all admonished NBC for hiring one of Trump’s most loyal co-conspirators, while citing the lies she repeatedly told on behalf of the former president, her aiding in Trump’s fake elector scheme, and her efforts to pressure canvassers not to certify the election.
Serving a president who called journalists ‘the enemy’
The idea that someone who’d helped try to overturn an election would then land a cushy contributor role at a news network is and should be repulsive to most people.
McDaniel worked in service of a president who called the press “the enemy of the people,” who celebrated violence against journalists, who praised dictators like Vladimir Putin and regimes like North Korea.
In 2018, McDaniel had her RNC act as master-of-ceremonies for Trump’s “Fake News Awards,” a PR event meant to discredit critical news, and a stunt that even many Republicans mocked and condemned.
McDaniel has since chalked up her actions as mere occupational hazard: “When you’re the RNC chair, you kind of take one for the whole team.”
Of course, the “whole team” in that case was Trump — not the party, not America — and “taking one” meant doing things on his behalf that were dishonest, un-American, and dangerous. If that were truly the job requirement of the RNC chair, she was free to resign at any point. Instead, she fought to hold on to her position.
I’ve long worried about the practice of hiring people who were complicit in Trump’s systematic dismantling of democratic institutions by news outlets. It’s lamentable and deleterious, and a practice that’s done indelible harm to our business, the business of telling the truth. My network, CNN, is not exempt.
Trump’s former flunkies, whether at the RNC, inside the White House communications shop, or on his campaigns, went willingly into his orbit in search of power, watched him do unconscionable things, and now want to use us, the news business, to help launder their reputations. And we do it.
McDaniel, just like others before her hoping to return to polite society after aiding and abetting a political arsonist, wants to use the good reputations of the very people they condemned, villainized and discredited — some of whom chose not to go work for Trump — to reinvent and rebrand.
Putting those people on the payroll of a news organization is a terrible idea, and hopefully one that, with the backlash against McDaniel, may finally come to an end.