Tag: Kristen Welker

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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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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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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Trump’s ‘Meet the Press’ interview was a lie-filled exercise in pointlessness

Kristen Welker, the new host of NBC’s “Meet the Press”

My main takeway from Kristen Welker’s interview with Donald Trump on NBC’s “Meet the Press” Sunday is how little commentary there’s been after the fact. Oh, there’s some, and maybe there will be more later. But, honestly, we’ve been down this road many, many times, and at this point there’s really not much to say.

The most important question is: Why? “Meet the Press” is a prestigious program, so much so that you’d think Welker’s first guest might be President Biden. Welker opened, though, by saying that Biden had in fact been invited, which suggests that the White House turned her down. Poynter media critic Tom Jones speculates that Biden didn’t want to be questioned about his son, Hunter, who last week was indicted on federal gun charges.

As he always does, Trump confronted Welker with a stream-of-consciousness gusher. For every lie she called out, she had to let another 10 go just because of the sheer volume of idiocy coming out of his mouth. In the post-debate panel, New York Times political reporter Peter Baker called Trump a “bulldozer, shoveling falsehoods and lies.” Indeed. At least Welker didn’t interview Trump in front of a howling MAGA mob, as CNN’s Kaitlan Collins did earlier this year. On the other hand, I thought Collins did a better, more aggressive job of pushing back than Welker did, even though Welker had the advantage of recording Trump ahead of time and occasionally interrupting the flow with a return to the studio, where she pointed out a few of the former president’s lies. NBC News did run an online fact-check, but who’s going to look at that?

New York University journalism professor Jay Rosen, writing on the Platform Formerly Known as Twitter, criticized Welker and NBC News for offering “a ‘zero innovations’ model,” explaining: “Everything was predictable, nothing was surprising, and new host Kristen Welker did nothing to justify going to the well again with another Trump Q&A.” Writing in The Daily Beast, Corbin Bolies added that “like those who have tried before, her inherent skills as an interviewer were no match for a chaotic interview subject like Trump.”

The argument for interviewing Trump is that, despite facing numerous federal criminal charges, he’s leading his Republican rivals for the presidential nomination and is tied with Biden. I get it. But it was a terrible way to kick off Welker’s debut at “Meet the Press,” and it opens her to the criticism that was often voiced about her predecessor, Chuck Todd — that he would rather normalize authoritarianism than stand up to Trump and his allies.

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Will the media normalize Trump because he acted almost normal?

The big question is how much credit the media will give President Trump for not acting like a crazed sociopath. I thought Joe Biden won on style and substance, with a lovely closing, although he was more inarticulate than usual tonight. (He seemed to realize it and picked through his words carefully.)

Kristen Welker did a great job as moderator. And we can all count ourselves lucky that we will never have to watch Trump debate again. I’ll join with the conventional wisdom and observe that Trump needed to win a lot of people over tonight. It’s hard to see how he did that. The fact-checkers are going to go nuts on him, too. So, advantage Biden.

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