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From New York Times, I'm Michael Barbaro. This is The Daily. Today, the saga of Ronald McDaniel and MBC, and what it reveals about the state of television news headed into the 2024 presidential race. Jim Rutenberg, a Times writer at large, is our guest. It's Monday, April first. Jim, NBC News just went through a very public, a very searing drama over the past week that we wanted you to make sense of in your unique capacity as a longtime media and political reporter. At the Times. This is your sweet spot. You were, I believe, born to dissect this story for us.

Brother. Well, on the one hand, this is a very small moment for a major network like NBC. They hire as a contributor, not an anchor, not a correspondent, as a contributor, Rona McDaniel, the former RNC Chairwoman. It blows up in a mini-scandal at the network. But to me, it represents a much larger issue that's been there since that moment. Donald J. Trump took his shiny gold escalator down to announce his presidential run in 2015. This struggle by the news media to figure out, especially on television, how do we capture him, cover him for all of his lies, all the challenges he poses to democratic norms, yet not alienate some 74, 75 million American voters who still follow him, still believe in him, and still want to hear his reality reflected in the news that they're listening to.

Right. Which is about as gnarly a conundrum as anyone has ever dealt with in the news media.

Well, it's proven so far unsolvable.

Well, let's use the story of what actually happened with Ronan McDaniel and NBC to illustrate your point. I think that means describing precisely what happened in this situation.

The story starts out so simply. It's such a basic thing that television networks orgs do. As elections get underway, they want people who will reflect the two parties. They want talking heads, they want insiders. They want them on their payroll so they can rely on them whenever they need them, and they want them to be high levels so they can speak with great knowledge about the two major candidates. Right.

Rather than needing to beg these people to come on their show at 6:00 when they might be busy and it's not their full-time job, they go off and they basically put them on retainer for a bunch of money.

Yeah. In this case, here's this perfect scenario because quite recently, Ronan McDaniel, the chairwoman of the Republican National Committee through the Trump era, most of it, is now out on the market. She's actually recently been forced out of the party, and all the networks are interested because here's the consummate insider from Trump world ready to get snatched up under contract for the next election and can really represent this movement that they've been trying to capture. So MBC's key news executives move pretty aggressively pretty swiftly, and they sign her up for a $300,000 a year contributors contract.

Nice money if you can get it.

Not millions of dollars that they pay their anchors, but a very nice contract. I'll take it. You'll take it. In the eyes of MBC execs, she was perfect because she can be on Meet the Press as a panelist. She can help as they figure out some of their coverage. They have 24 hours a day to fill, and here's an official from the RNC.

You can almost imagine the question that would be asked to her. It's 10:00 PM on election night. Ronna, what What are the Trump people thinking right now? They're looking at the same numbers you are.

That was good, but that's exactly it. We all know it, right? This is television in our current era. Last Friday, NBC makes what should be a routine announcement, but one they're very proud of, that they've hired Ronan McDaniel. In a statement, they say it couldn't be a more important moment to have a voice like Ron as on the team. So all is good, except for there's a flying the ointment because it turns out that Ronan McDaniel has been slated to appear on Meet the Press not as a paid NBC contributor, but as a former recently ousted RNC chair with the Meet the Press host, Kristen Walker, who's preparing to have a real tough interview with Ronan McDaniel. Because, of course, Ronan McDaniel was Chair of the Party and at Trump's side as he tried to refuse his election laws. So this was supposed to be- A showdown interview. From NBC News in Washington, the longest running show in television history. This is Meet the Press with Kristener. Here, all of a sudden, Kristenr is thrown for a loop.

In full disclosure to our viewers, this interview was scheduled weeks before it was announced that McDaniel had become a paid MBC news contributor.

Because now she's actually interviewing a member of the family who's on the same payroll.

Right. Suddenly, she's interviewing a colleague.

This will be a news interview, and I was not involved in her hiring.

What happens during the interview?

Well, Welker is prepared for a tough interview, and that's exactly what she does.

Can you say, as you sit here today, did Joe Biden win the election, fair and square? He won. He's the legitimate President.

Fair and square, he won. It's certified. It's done. She presses her on the key question that a lot of Republicans get asked these days, do you accept Joe Biden was the winner of the election? Why has it taken you until now to be able to say that?

I'm going to push back a little.

Mcdaniel gets defensive at times. Because I do think it's It's fair to say there were problems in 2020. To say that does not mean he's not the legend of the president.

But, Ronna, when you say that, it suggests that there was something wrong with the election. You know that the election was the most heavily scrutinized.

It's a really combative interview.

I want to turn now to your actions in the aftermath of the 2020 election. Sure.

And Walker actually really does go deeply into McDaniel's record in those weeks before January sixth.

On November 17th, you and Donald Trump were recorded pushing two Republican Michigan election officials not to certify the results of the election.

And on the call- For instance, she presses McDaniel on McDaniel's role in an attempt to convince a couple county commissioner-level canvassers in Michigan to not certify Biden's victory. Our call that night was to say, Are you okay? Vote your conscience, not pushing them to do anything. Mcdaniel says, Look, I was just telling them to vote their conscience. They should do whatever they think is right.

But you said Call that- Do not sign it. If you can go home tonight, do not sign it. How can people read that as anything other than a pressure campaign?

No, the pressure- And Welker's not going to just let her off the hook.

Welker presses her on Trump's own comments about January sixth and Trump's efforts recently to gloss over some of the violence and to say that those who have been arrested, he'll free them.

Do you support that?

I want to be very clear. The violence that happened on January sixth is unacceptable. This is a frankly fascinating moment because you can hear McDaniel starting to, if not quite reverse some of her positions, though in some cases she does that, at least really soften her language. It's almost as if she's switching uniform from the RNC one to an MBC one, or almost like breaking from a role she was playing.

Ronna, why not speak out earlier? Why just speak out about that now?

When you're the RNC chair, you take one for the whole team, right? Now I get to be a little bit more myself, right? She says, Hey, you know what? Sometimes as RNC chair, you just have to take it for the team sometimes. Right. What she's really saying is, I did things as chairwoman of the Republican National Committee that now that I no longer have that job, I can candidly say, I wish I hadn't done, which is very honest, but it's also another way of saying I'm two-faced or I was playing a part.

Ronan McDaniel, thank you very much for being here this morning. Thank you for having me.

Then something extraordinary happens. I have to say, I've never seen a moment like this in decades of watching television news and covering television news.

Welcome back. The panel is here. Chuck Todd, NBC News Chief Political Analyst.

Welker brings her regular panel on, including Chuck Todd, now the senior NBC political analyst.

Chuck, let's dive right in. What were your takeaways?

And he launches right into what he calls-Look, let me deal with the elephant in the room. The elephant being this hiring of McDang. I I think our bosses owe you an apology for putting you in this situation. And he proceeds on MBC's air to lace into management for, as he describes it, putting Welker in this crazy, awkward position. Because I don't know what to believe. She She was now a paid contributor by MBC News. I have no idea whether any answer she gave to you was because she didn't want to mess up her contract. Todd is very hung up on this idea that when she was speaking for the party, she would say one thing, and now that she's on the payroll at NBC, she's saying another thing. She has credibility issues that she still has to deal with. Is she speaking for herself or is she speaking on behalf of who's paying her?

Todd is basically saying, How are we supposed to know which one to believe?

Right. What can we believe? It is important for this network and for always to have a wide aperture. Having ideological diversity on this panel is something I prided myself on. We take you and I- What he's effectively saying is that his bosses should have never never hired her in this capacity. I understand the motivation, but this execution, I think, was poor.

Someone said to me last night, We live in complicated times. Thank you guys for being here. I really appreciate it.

Now, let's just note here, this isn't just any player at NBC. Chuck Todd is obviously a major news name at the network. Him doing this appears to just open the floodgates across the entire NBC news brand, especially on its sister cable network, MSNBC. Where I said I'd never seen anything like what I saw on Meet the Press that morning, I'd never seen anything like this either, because now the entire MSNBC lineup is in open rebellion. I mean, from the minute that the sun comes up. There is Joe Scarborough, Mika Przezinski. We weren't asked our opinion of the hiring, but if we were, we would have strongly objected to it for several reasons. They're on fire over this. We believe NBC news should seek out conservative Republican voices, but it should be conservative Republicans, not a person who used her position of power to be an anti-democracy election denier. But it rolls out across the entire schedule. Because Ronan McDaniel has been a major peddler of the big lie. Joy Reid. The fact that Ms.

Mcdaniel is on the payroll at NBC News, to me, that is inexplicable.

I mean, you wouldn't hire a mobster to work at a DA's Rachel Maddow devotes an entire half hour. It's not about just being associated with Donald Trump and his time in the Republican Party. It's not even about lying or not lying. It's about our system of government. Thumming her noses at her bosses and basically accusing them of abetting a traitorous figure in American history. I mean, just extraordinary stuff. It's television history. And let's face it, we journalists, our bosses, know we can be seen as cry babies, and we're paid complainers. We're Kavechis. That's what we're paid to do. But in this case, the NBC executives cannot ignore this because in the outcry, there's a very clear point that they're all making. Ronan McDaniel is not just a voice from the other side. She was a fundamental part of Trump's efforts to deny his election laws. This is not inviting the other side. This is someone who's on the wrong side. Of history. Of history, of these moments that we've covered and are still covering.

Right. I think it's fair to say that at this point, everyone understands that Ronan McDaniel's time at NBC News is going to be very short-lived.

Yeah, basically, after all this, the executives at NBC have to facts, it's over. On Tuesday night, they release a statement to the staff saying as much. They don't cite the questions about red lines or what Ronna McDaniel represent or didn't represent. They just say, We need to have a unified newsroom. We want cohesion. This isn't working.

I think in the end, she was a paid contributor for four days.

Yeah, one of the shortest tenure in television news history. Look, in one respect, by their standards, this is a pretty small contract, a few hundred thousand dollars they may have to pay out. But it was way more costly because they hired her. They brought her on board because they wanted to appeal to these tens of millions of Americans who still love Donald J. Trump. And what happens now is that this entire thing is blown up in their face, and those very same people now see a network that in their view, in the view of Republicans across the country, this network will not accept any Republican. So it becomes more about that. Fox news. Mbc's longtime rival, goes wall to wall with this. Now, MBC News just cave to the breathless demands from their far left, frankly, emotionally unhinged host. I mean, I had it on my desk all day, and every minute I looked at that screen, it was pounding on these liberals at MBC News, driving this Republican out. It's the shortest tenure in TV history, I think. But why? Well, because she supports Donald Trump, period.

In a way, this leaves NBC worse off with that Trump Republican audience they had wanted to court than maybe even they were before.

It's like a boomerang with a grenade on it. Yeah, it completely explodes in their And that's why, to me, the whole episode is so representative of this eight-year conundrum for the news media, especially on television. They still haven't been able to crack the code for how to handle the Trump movement, the Trump candidacy, and what it has wrought on the American political system and American journalism.

We'll be right back. Jim, put into context this painful episode of NBC into that larger conundrum you just diagnosed that the media has faced when it comes to Trump.

Well, Michael, it's been there from the very beginning, from the very beginning of his political rise. The media was on this seesaw. They go back and forth over how to cover him. Sometimes they want cover him quite aggressively because he's such a challenging candidate. He was bursting so many norms. But at other times, there was this instinct to understand his appeal for the same reason. He's such an unusual candidate. So there was a great desire to really understand his voters and frankly, to speak to his voters because they're part of the audience. And we all lived it, right? But just let me take you back anyway, because everything's fresh again with perspective. So If you go back, let's look at when he first ran. The networks, if you recall, saw him as almost like a novelty candidate. He was going to spice up what was expected to be a boring campaign between the usual suspects. And he was a ratings magnet. The networks, they just couldn't get enough of it. They allowed him at times to really shatter their own norms. Welcome back to Meet the Press, sir. Good morning, Chuck. Good morning. Let me start- He was able to just call into the studio and rift with the likes of George George Stephanopoulos and Chuck Todd.

Can be true. What does it have to do with Hillary? She can't talk about me because nobody respects women more than Donald Trump. I'm going to take out- And CNN gave him a lot of unmitigated air time, if you recall, during the campaign. I do. They would run the press conferences. It's the largest winery on the East Coast. I own it 100%. And let him promote his Trump Steaks and his Trump wine. Trump Steaks. Where are the stakes? Do we have a steak? I mean, it got that crazy. But again, the were huge. And then he wins. And because they had previously given him all that air time, they've, in retrospect, given him a political gift. And more than that, now have a journalistic imperative to really address him in a different way, to cover him as they would have covered any other candidate, which, let's face it, they weren't doing initially. So there's this extra motivation to make up for lost ground and maybe for some journalistic omissions. Right.

Correct for the lack of a rigorous journalistic filter in the campaign.

Exactly. The big thing that this will be a remember for us, we're going to call a lie alive. I don't want to sugarcoat this because facts matter. The fact is President Trump lies. Trump lies. We're going to say it's a lie. I think we can't just mince around it because they are lies, and so we need to call them what they are. We're no longer going to use euphemisms or loser language. We're going to call it for what it is. Trump lies in tweets. He spreads false information at rallies. He lies when he doesn't need to. He lies when the truth is more than enough for him. Cnn was running Kairons, it would fact check Trump and call lies, lies on the screen while Trump is talking. They were challenging Trump to his face. One of the statements that you made in the tail end of the campaign in the midterms. Here we go. Well, if you don't mind, Mr. President, that this caravan was an invasion. In these crazy press conferences. They're hundreds of miles away, though. They're hundreds and hundreds of miles away. That's not an invasion. Honestly, I think you should let me run the country.

You run CNN All right. If you did it well, your ratings would be much better. Let me ask. If I may ask one other question. Mr. President, if I may ask one other question, are you worried? That's enough. That's enough. And Trump is giving it right back. I'll tell you what, CNN should be ashamed of itself having you working for You are a rude, terrible person. You shouldn't be working for CNN. Very combative. So this was this incredibly fraught moment for the American press. You've got tens of millions of Trump supporters seeing what's really basic fact-checking. These look like attacks to Trump supporters. Trump, in turn, is calling the press, the reporters are enemies of the people. So it's a terrible dynamic. And when January sixth happens, it's so obviously out of control. And what the traditional press that follows traditional journalistic rules has to do is make it clear that the claims that Trump is making about a stolen election are just so abjectly false that they don't warrant a single minute of real consideration once the reporting has been done to show how false they are. And I think that American journalism really emerged from feeling strongly about its own values and its own place in society.

But then there's still tens of millions of Trump voters, and they don't feel so good about the coverage, and they don't agree that January sixth was an insurrection. We enter yet another period where the press is going to have to now maybe rethink some things.

In what way?

Well, there's a quiet period after January 6. Trump is off of social media. The smoke is literally dissipating from the air in Washington. And news executives are standing there on the proverbial battlefield, taking a new look at their situation. And they're seeing that in this clear light, they've got some new problems, perhaps none more important for their entire business models than that their ratings are quickly crashing. And part of diminishment is that a huge part of the country, that Trump-loving part of the audience, is really now severed from their coverage. They see the press is actually, in some cases, being complicit in stealing an election. And so these news executives, again, especially on television, which is so ratings dependent, they've got a problem. So after presumably learning all these lessons about journalism and how to confront power, there's a first subtle and then much less subtle rethinking. Maybe we need to pull back from that approach, and maybe we need to take some new lessons and switch it up a little bit and reverse some of what we did. One of the best examples of this is none other than CNN. It had come under new management, was being led by a guy named Chris Licht, a veteran of cable news, but also Steven Colbert's late Night show, been his last job.

His new job under this new management is, We're going to recalibrate a little bit. Chris Lick proceeds to try to bring the network back to the center.

How does he do that?

Well, we see some key personalities who represented the Trump combat era start losing air time, and some of them lose their jobs. There's talk of, We want more Republicans on the air. There was a famous magazine article about Chris Lick's Balancing Act here. And Chris Lick says to a reporter, Tim Alberta, of the Atlantic magazine, Look, a lot in the media, including at his own network, put on a jersey. Took aside. They took aside. And he says, I think we understand that Jersey cannot go back on. Because he says, In the end of the day, by the way, it didn't even work. We didn't change anyone's mind.

He's saying that confrontational approach that defined the four years Trump was in office, that was a reaction to the feeling that TV news had failed to properly treat Trump with sufficient skepticism, that that actually was a failure, both of journalism and of the TV news business. Is that what he's saying?

Yeah. On the business side, it's easier call, right? You want a bigger audience, and you're not getting the bigger audience. But he's making a argument as well that if the job is to convey the truth and take it to the people, and they take that into account as they make their own voting decisions and formulate their own opinions about American politics, if tens of millions of people who do believe that election was stolen are completely tuning you out because now they see you as a political combatant, you're not achieving your ultimate goal as a journalist.

What does Licks, Don't Put A Jersey Back on approach look like on CNN for its viewers?

Wow, it didn't look good. People might remember this, but the most glaring example. Please welcome the front runner for the Republican nomination for President Donald Trump. Was when he held a town hall meeting featuring Donald J. Trump, now candidate Trump, before an audience packed with Trump's fans. When you look at what happened during that election, unless you're a very stupid person, you see what happens. A lot of the people Trump let loose a string of falsehoods. Most people understand what happened. That was a rigged election. The audience, this pro-Trump audience, was cheering him on. Are you ready? Can I talk? Yeah, what's the answer? Do you mind?

I would like for you to answer the question.

Okay, it's very simple to answer. That's why I asked it. It's very simple to... You are a nasty person. I'll tell you. And jeering the CNN anchor hosting this, Kaitlyn Collins, on CNN's own air, it was a disaster.

It felt like a call back to the unlearnt lessons of 2016.

Yeah, and in this case, CNN staff was up in arms. Big shakeup in the cable news industry as CNN makes another change at the top. Chris Lick is officially out at CNN after a chaotic run as chairman and CEO. Chris Lick didn't survive it.

The chief executive's departure comes as he faced criticism in recent weeks after the network hosted a town hall with Donald Trump and the network's rating started to drop.

But I want to say That the CNN leadership still, even after that, as they brought new leadership in, said, This is still the path we're going to go on. Maybe that didn't work out, but we're still here. This is still what we have to do. Right.

And this idea is very much in the water of TV news, that this is the right overall direction.

Yeah, this is by no means isolated to CNN. This is throughout the traditional news business. These conversations are happening everywhere, but CNN was living it at that point.

And this, of course, is how we get to He, deciding to hire Rihanna McDaniel.

Because they're picking up right where that conversation leaves off, they're having the same conversation. But for NBC, you could argue this tension between journalistic values and audience. It's even more pressing. Because even though MSNBC is a niche cable network, MBC News is part of an old-fashioned broadcast network. It's on television stations throughout the country. In fact, those networks, they still have 630 newscasts. Believe it or not, millions of people still watch those every night. Maybe not as many as they used to, but there are still some six or seven million people tuning in to nightly news. That's important.

We should say that number is sometimes double or triple that of the cable news primetime shows that get all the attention.

On their best nights. So this is big business still. And that business is based on broad. It's called broadcast for a reason. That's based on broad audiences. So, MBC had a business in imperative, and they argue they had a journalistic imperative.

So given all of that, Jim, I think the big messy question here is, when it comes to MBC, did they make a tactical error around hiring the wrong Republican, which blew up? Or did they make an even larger error in thinking that the way you handle Trump and his supporters is to work this hard to reach them when they might not even be reachable?

The best way to answer that question is to tell you what they're saying right now, MBC management. But management's saying is, yes, this was a tactical error. This was clearly the wrong Republican. We get it. But they're saying, We are going to, and they said this in their statement announcing that they were severing ties with McDaniel, they said, We're going to redouble our efforts to represent a broad spectrum of the American American votership. That's what they meant, was that we're going to still try to reach these Trump voters with people who can relate to them and they can relate to.

But the question is, how do you even do that when so many of his supporters believe a lie? How is NBC? How is CNN? How are any of these TV networks, if they have decided that this is their mission, how are they supposed to speak to people who believe something fundamentally untrue as a core part of their political identity?

That's the catch-22. How do you get that Trump movement person who's also an insider when the litmus test to be an insider in the Trump movement is to believe in the denialism, or at least say you do? So that's a real journalistic problem. The thing that we haven't really touched here is, what are these networks doing day in and day out? They're not producing reported pieces, where I think it's a little easier. You just report the news.

You go out into the world, talk to people, and then you present it to the world as a nuanced portrait of the country.

Right. This thing is true, this thing is false. Again, in many cases, pretty straightforward. But their bread and butter is talking heads. It's live. It's not edited. It's not that much reported. Their whole business model, especially again on cable, which has 24 hours to fill, is talking heads. If you want the perspective from the Trump movement, journalistically, especially when it comes to denialism, but when it comes to some other major subjects in American life, you're walking into a place where they're going to say things that aren't true that don't pass your journalistic standards, the most basic standards of journalism.

Right. So you're saying if TV sticks with this model, a low cost, lots of talk approach to news, then they are going to have to solve the riddle of who to bring on, who represents Trump's America if they want that audience. And Now they've got this red line that they've established that that person can't be someone who denies the 2020 election reality. But like you just said, that's the litmus test for being in Trump's orbit. This doesn't really look like a conundrum. This looks like a bit of a crisis for TV news because it may end up meaning that they can't hire that person that they need for this model, which means that perhaps a network like NBC does need to wave goodbye to a big segment of these viewers and these eyeballs who support Trump.

I mean, on the one hand, they are not ready to do that, and they would never concede that that's something they're ready to do. The problem is, barring some change in their news model, there's no solution to this. Why bar changes to their news model, I guess, is the question. Because over the years, it's gotten more and more expensive to produce news, the news that I'm talking about, like recorded packages, and what we refer to as reporting. Just go and report the news. Don't gab about it. Just what's going on, what's true, what's false. That's actually very expensive in television, and they don't have the money they used to have. So the Talking Heads is their way to do programming at a level where they can afford it. They do some packages, 60 Minutes still does incredible work. Nbc does packages, but the lion's share, what they do is what we're talking about. And that's not going to change because the economics aren't there.

So then a final option, of course, to borrow something Chris Lick said, is that a network like NBC perhaps doesn't put a jersey on, but accepts the reality that a lot of the world sees them wearing a jersey.

Yeah. I mean, nobody wants to be seen as wearing a jersey in our business. No one wants to be wearing a jersey in our business. But maybe what they really have to accept is that we're just sticking to the true facts, and that may look like we're wearing a jersey, but we're not. And that may, at times look like it's lining up more with the Democrats, but we're not. If Trump is lying about a stolen election, that's not siding against him. That's siding for the truth, and that's what we're doing. It's easier said than done, and I don't think any of these concepts are new. I think there have been attempts to do that, but it's the world they're in, and it's the only option they really have. We're going to tell you the truth, even if it means that we're going to lose a big part of the country. Well, Jim, thank you very much. Thank you, Michael. We'll be right back.

Here's what else you need to know today.

We're coming Over the weekend, thousands of protesters took to the streets of Tel Aviv and Jerusalem in some of the largest domestic demonstrations against the government of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu since Israel invaded Gaza in the fall.

Some of the protesters called on Netanyahu to reach a ceasefire deal that would free the hostages taken by Hamas on October seventh. Others called for early elections that would remove Netanyahu from office. During a news conference on Sunday, Netanyahu rejected calls for early elections, saying they would paralyze his government at a crucial moment in the war. Today's episode was produced by Rob Zybko, Ricky Niveski, and Alex Stern, with help from Stella Tan. It was edited by Brenda Clinkenberg, with help from Rachel Quester and Paige Cawet, contains original music by Marion Lozano, Dan Powell, and Ron E. Misto, and was engineered by Chris Wood. Our theme music is by Jim Brunberg and Ben Lansferck of WNDYRLE. That's it for The Daily. I'm Michael Barbaro. See you tomorrow.