Author: Dan Kennedy

It’s worth saying again: Let’s stop paying partisan political hacks to bloviate on TV

Reporting for double duty: Donna Brazile was a paid bloviator for CNN while she was also deputy chair of the Democratic National Committee. Photo (cc) by Tim Pierce.

I’ve been arguing against hiring partisan political commentators for years, including three times (here, here and here) in the past week. Now NPR’s media reporter, David Folkenflik, has written a smart analysis questioning the practice, which has come under renewed scrutiny following NBC News’ hiring and firing of the election-denying, Trump-enabling Ronna McDaniel, former chair of the Republican National Committee. Folkenflik writes:

The networks — not just NBC — want to be able to rely on a stable of people to show up and be lively and informed on the air, often with little notice. They want to make sure they have voices reflecting an array of views from both parties. And they want exclusivity, which means they want to prevent the same high-profile figures from appearing on their competitors’ shows.

The hiring of McDaniel made conventional sense under this rubric.

We do not live in conventional times.

Indeed we do not, and if there’s a reason to have someone like McDaniel on the air, surely that can be accomplished without paying her $300,000 a year. After all, “Meet the Press” host Kristen Welker pointed out that McDaniel had already been scheduled to appear this past Sunday, as she had previously. One of the first rules of journalistic ethics is that we don’t pay sources, except, apparently, party hacks.

In fact, as Folkenflik reminds us, CNN actually stooped even lower than NBC by paying Democratic operative Donna Brazile while she was deputy chair of the Democratic National Committee. As he asks: “There are more than 330 million Americans and thousands of political professionals. Why pay for the right to interview them? Does anyone think Newt Gingrich will boycott television appearances if he’s not paid?”

The problem, of course, is that television news outlets, particularly cable, have endless hours to fill, and talk shows are a lot cheaper than actual journalism. But I would argue that the McDaniel fiasco offers an opportunity to revisit the whole practice of hiring political figures, Democrat or Republican, to come on the air and offer predictable talking points, all while keeping one eye on their next chance to get back in the game.

You can simultaneously believe (as I do) that hiring McDaniel was many bridges too far because of her election denialism on behalf of Donald Trump — and that the time has also come to stop throwing money at any political operatives.

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GBH becomes the latest public media outlet to eye layoffs

Given what’s going on in public media in general and at WBUR Radio in Boston specifically, this seemed inevitable. Aidan Ryan of The Boston Globe reports that GBH, the television and radio powerhouse, is considering layoffs in the face of shrinking revenues.

“Like many other media outlets, GBH is facing financial headwinds,” GBH chief executive Susan Goldberg told the Globe in a statement. “We are looking at a variety of ways to address this, including eliminating end-of-year bonuses across the organization. While final decisions have not yet been made, layoffs are not off the table.”

Disclosure: As many of you know, I was a paid contributor to GBH News from 1998 to 2022.

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McDaniel is out. But don’t get your hopes up that network execs have learned a lesson.

Ronna McDaniel. Photo (cc) 2018 by Gage Skidmore.

Ronna McDaniel is out at NBC News. Veteran media critic David Zurawick writes for CNN, “It was two days of the most aggressive, public and passionate pushback by employees against a decision by their bosses that I have seen in 35 years of covering the media.” His lead:

As wrongheaded as it was on so many levels, NBC’s decision to hire former Republican National Committee (RNC) chair Ronna McDaniel as a contributor might actually have done the nation a favor. The highly controversial move has helped drive a crucial conversation about the role of media in our political life at this moment of democratic crisis.

The NBC executives who thought this was a great idea really had no choice. Hosts on MSNBC from Rachel Maddow to Joe Scarborough said they wouldn’t have her on, and she was finished on NBC itself after she was eviscerated on “Meet the Press,” first by Kristen Welker, then in a post-interview commentary by Chuck Todd. It will be interesting to see whether anyone at the network will pay the price for this boneheaded move.

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As I’ve said before, I’m trying to balance two impulses. On the one hand, I don’t think the networks should hire any partisan players to bloviate on their airwaves, Democrat or Republican. Let’s hear from journalists. On the other hand, since they’re going to continue making such hires, I think it’s useful to differentiate someone like McDaniel, who amplified Donald Trump’s lies about the 2020 election, from your run-of-the-mill Trump-friendly commentator. Several observers have pointed out that CNN once hired the loathsome Corey Lewandowski, but that was during the pre-insurrection days when Trump was merely a racist sociopath rather than a budding authoritarian dictator.

Rather than learning the lesson that Zurawick is hoping for, my guess is that NBC executives are probably now going to feel pressured to hire a less toxic Trumper, someone like Marc Thiessen (currently on Fox News) or Byron York (ditto). And no, no one at Fox feels similarly pressured to bring in a liberal Joe Biden supporter. That’s not the way it works.

Earlier:

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WBUR offers buyouts to staff members

Cuts have begun at WBUR Radio (90.9 FM), with CEO Margaret Low announcing that the station needs to reduce spending by $4 million, or about 10%, in the fiscal year that begins July 1. Employees are being offered a voluntary buyout, although it’s not expected to be enough. “We anticipate that we’ll still need to freeze some open roles and do layoffs, but we’re hoping to eliminate as few jobs as possible,” Low wrote on the WBUR website. Aidan Ryan of The Boston Globe has more.

Earlier:

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When The Associated Press failed to stand up to the Nazis

A new book, “Newshawks in Berlin,” by Larry Heinzerling and Randy Herschaft, details the shameful coddling of the Nazis before and during World War II at the hands of The Associated Press’ Berlin bureau. Tunku Varadarajan reviews it (free link) for The Wall Street Journal. There are echoes of my Northeastern colleague Laurel Leff’s book “Buried by the Times,” about The New York Times’ playing down of the Holocaust.

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California dreaming

It’s hard to know exactly what’s going on here. But Lana Bellamy of the Times Union in Albany, New York, has a story about a local district attorney named David Hoovler who’s been working with a public relations agency in Cheyenne, Wyoming, to produce favorable stories about him that are published in pink-slimy websites like California Weekly. My guess is that Hoovler’s getting ripped off.

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NBC News’ hiring of Ronna McDaniel sets off a crisis she may not survive

I did not watch Ronna McDaniel’s appearance on “Meet the Press” Sunday. Brian Stelter has a detailed summary on Threads, and that’s plenty for me. It sounds like host Kristen Welker found her voice and really went after McDaniel, who in her previous job as chair of the Republican National Committee regularly lied and engaged in election denialism on behalf of Donald Trump.

What I did see was former “Meet the Press” host Chuck Todd’s remarkable takedown of NBC News executives for hiring McDaniel in the first place. Neither Welker nor Todd has a reputation for tough questioning; quite the opposite. But Welker really went after McDaniel, and Todd took the network to task, telling Welker that they “owe you an apology” and that it was impossible to “know what to believe” given McDaniel’s previous lies.

Good for both of them. A previous announcement that McDaniel would also pop up on MSNBC has been rescinded, so it’s hard to see what value she can provide to NBC News given the limited amount of time that it commands the network’s airwaves.

My instinct, as I wrote the other day, is to rip the presence of any partisan players on television news shows, whether Democrat or Republican. Clearly, though, the hiring of McDaniel has resonated in a way that, say, the hiring of Jen Psaki or Mick Mulvaney did not. Tom Jones of Poynter Online put it this way:

There’s no issue with NBC News hiring McDaniel as a contributor based on her politics alone…. However, the problem isn’t McDaniel’s views on, say, the economy or immigration or crime or abortion. The problem is McDaniel has a serious credibility problem. And her actions, most notably around the 2020 election, put the country and our very democracy at risk.

Similarly, Jon Allsop of the Columbia Journalism Review said that “the glaring problem with her hiring is not that she was (or is) a partisan hack or anything to do with her policy positions, but her deep complicity in Trump’s election denialism.” But he also offered some optimism, adding:

Perhaps ironically, this desperate episode has given rise to what I see as a very hopeful one: the performances on air yesterday of Todd and, especially, Welker. In the past, I’ve criticized “Meet the Press” (and the Sunday show format as a whole) for letting lying politicians off the hook, but Welker’s interview with McDaniel yesterday was one of the best I’ve seen on any such show in years: it was tenacious, devastatingly so, without being performatively confrontational or rude.

It’s pretty obvious that McDaniel’s hiring has set off a crisis at NBC News, one that may end only with the cancellation of her contract. For instance, Ryan Lizza reports in Politico that Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski spoke out against the hiring on air earlier today. I’m not entirely sure what I think about this. As I’ve said, I would lock the revolving door and not hire any of these folks, going right back to George Stephanopoulos, who years ago jumped from the Clinton White House into a cushy job at ABC News. A pox on all of them.

But McDaniel, as Jones and Allsop write, is different. We almost lost the country on Jan. 6, 2021 — and she brazenly told Welker that she saw it as her role to “take one for the team” rather than speak out. As Todd said, if she admits she wasn’t telling the truth then, how can we know that she’s telling the truth now?

More: I want to add that joining Todd on the panel were Boston Globe columnist Kimberly Atkins Stohr and Stephen Hayes, editor of The Dispatch, a Never Trump conservative website. They were both excellent as well, with Atkins Stohr pointing out that McDaniel worked with Trump in an attempt to toss out 2020 ballots cast by Black voters in her hometown of Detroit. The entire panel discussion about McDaniel can be seen here.

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Yankee Quill winner Ellen Clegg on why innovation must be part of journalism’s future

Ellen Clegg

Ellen Clegg — a retired Boston Globe editor, the co-author of our book, the co-host and producer of our podcast, the co-chair of the nonprofit Brookline.News, and my friend — was one of five journalists who received the prestigious Yankee Quill Award this past Saturday. Read about all five here.

The Yankee Quill recognizes great journalists who have also contributed to the betterment of our profession. As the Academy of New England Journalists puts it, “Selection for the award is not based on any single achievement, or for doing your job each day, but rather on the broad influence for good over the course of a career.” Her prepared remarks follow.

Thank you for this honor. Thanks to friends and colleagues, and thank you to my family for your support over many years when I worked nights and weekends, or got a ping from a boss at 5 a.m.

The Yankee Quill award recognizes past achievements over the long arc of a career. It’s about history and tradition.

But today’s honorees are also about the future. We’re innovating and experimenting, using digital tools that, 25 years ago, we never imagined would exist. We’re connecting with communities and readers in novel ways — deploying multimedia and measuring and nurturing audiences. Storytelling is as old as the Bronze Age and as new as TikTok.

The business of fact-based reporting that holds power to account, faces existential challenges. You know them well: digital disruption, the collapse of print advertising, the rise of platforms built on algorithms of anger.

As Professor Penny Abernathy has written, these forces have resulted in news deserts across the country — entire counties where there is no newspaper left at all. Some 2,900 newspapers have closed down since 2005 — nearly one-third of the nation’s total. About 43,000 journalism jobs have disappeared.

And, for sure, we didn’t always help ourselves. Legacy newsrooms were sometimes slow to recognize the promise — and, frankly, some of the perils — of digital publication. We were slow to change our business models. We were slow to put up paywalls that enabled us to assign a fair value to the work of our journalists. We were slow to adapt to a more frenzied pace, slow to restructure traditional newsrooms so they were digital-first.

But these same challenges have also prompted a wave of innovation and experimentation like never before. Steven Waldman, the cofounder of Report for America, calls it a replanting of local news.

Dan Kennedy and I began reporting on this phenomenon in 2019, for a book called “What Works in Community News.” We profiled nine media startups, and interviewed scores of enterprising journalists who are in the process of reinventing our business. We found an emerging movement that is nothing short of inspiring. It’s also sometimes a hard journey, fraught with uncertainty.

This wave of innovation isn’t temporary. It’s part of our future. I’m proud to be here today with journalists who are sustaining local news and providing the essential information that is so necessary to participatory democracy.

Thank you.

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Partisan hacks like Ronna McDaniel add nothing to our media discourse

With her attacks on the media and her lies on behalf of Donald Trump, former Republican National Committee chair Ronna McDaniel — who was just hired by NBC News and MSNBC — is worse than most. But as I have long argued, one of the many problems with cable news is that they hire partisan hacks to comment on the news rather than journalists. I talked about it with Northeastern Global News back in 2022 when Mick Mulvaney and Jen Psaki made the move from politics to punditry, to no one’s benefit but their own.

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Sarah-Ann Shaw, a pioneering journalist, was a vital part of Boston’s fabric

My family always watched the news on WBZ-TV (Channel 4) when I was growing up, so I had the privilege of seeing Sarah-Ann Shaw’s stories on the Black community, social justice and numerous other topics from a fairly early age. The pioneering Black journalist worked at WBZ from 1969 until her retirement in 2000. She died Thursday at the age of 90.

A WBZ story on her death quotes the late WBZ reporter Charles Austin as saying: “People were just waking up to the fact that there was an underserved community and they needed to be recognized in a way that was on a parallel, on a par, with everyone else.”

WBUR Radio (90.9 FM) has an interview with Ron Mitchell, a retired video editor and videographer at WBZ who’s now the publisher of The Bay State Banner. Here’s an excerpt:

Sarah-Ann Shaw was a trailblazer. She was a daughter of Roxbury, and she held her community in the highest esteem. So she made sure that when she told stories about the greater Roxbury and … greater Black community, that she told the truth about our community. You know, back when she started, a lot of the news, especially about Roxbury, was very negative. And it was hard to get positive stories about our community, and Sarah-Ann Shaw made sure that those stories existed … they were honest, and she was telling her truth about her community.

Before moving to WBZ, Ms. Shaw was a reporter at “Say Brother,” a show created by WGBH-TV (Channel 2) amid the civil-rights movement of the 1960s. (The show was later renamed “Basic Black.”) “It’s very, very important that ‘Say Brother’ did shows and expose people in the community about different areas — police brutality, education — that they could not really get from other sources,” Ms. Shaw said in 2018 on the 50th-anniversary episode of the program.

The Boston Globe quotes Ms. Shaw from a 2007 interview: “I tried to do stories that showed positive events in the Black community. I thought it was important particularly for young Black kids to see themselves not on television for fighting, for doing drugs, et cetera, but for doing something positive.”

Sarah-Ann Shaw was a vital part of the city’s fabric, showing the way for two generations of Black and female reporters in Boston. It couldn’t have been easy. But by all accounts, she handled her role with grace and professionalism. She will be missed.

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