What To Take Away From NBC's Hire And Fire Of Ronna McDaniel

NBC News parted ways with former Republican National Committee chair Ronna McDaniel four days after hiring her. The trigger: Multiple star anchors, led by Chuck Todd and Rachel Maddow, viewed McDaniel’s involvement in efforts to overturn the 2020 presidential election result as disqualifying. It was an on-air revolt.

Oliver Darcy, reporting for CNN’s Reliable Sources newsletter, said that "weak leadership was put on full display."

Ronna McDaniel, as outgoing Republican National Committee chairwoman, gives her last speech in the ... [+] position at the general session of the RNC Spring Meeting Friday, March 8, 2024, in Houston. (AP Photo/Michael Wyke)

The word “disqualifying” for McDaniel does matter here, because it implies a standard around democracy. What’s missing from the brouhaha is that this is a real opportunity for major television news houses to build a minimum democratic-norms-based standard for news staffing.

Strong leadership includes setting standards or principles and ensuring their consistent application.

A declaration of principle is already evident in NBC Universal Chairman Cesar Conde’s reversal. Announcing McDaniel’s dropping, Conde expressed NBC’s commitment to a principle: “We must have diverse viewpoints on our programs, and to that end, we will redouble our efforts to seek voices that represent different parts of the political spectrum.”

There are two framing elements in that line. First, Conde frames the basis for bringing in McDaniel under the principle of having diverse viewpoints on air. Second, he ends the sentence by defining the qualifying arena as “different parts of the political spectrum.” In effect, he says that the original purpose of hiring McDaniel was to bring in political diversity. But is this principle going to be applicable afresh for future situations?

The principle of seeking diverse voices was never an absolute standard or an end in itself for journalistic work. It is meant to fix the power imbalance inherent in the way journalistic sourcing works. For instance, the Reuters Institute at Oxford University released a cross-continental media study in 2023 showing that news organizations underrepresent and misrepresent disadvantaged communities, and that this undermines trust in the news. The study used data from 41 focus groups convened in the four countries Brazil, India, the UK, and the U.S. The seeking of diverse viewpoints is widely seen as one way to address this representation deficit.

But there is another real promise of journalistic work, big media or small, for democracy. This is truth-determination. Seeing diverse viewpoints serves this end too. It lets journalists have an independent and countervailing power. The ultimate power-conferring truth in any democracy is who won a nation’s top election. Political party leaders who have both systematically denied and even worked to undermine this truth are thus anti-democratic using this most minimal of standards. Hiring them undermines both the democratic way of life and journalism.

For journalism to serve democracy better, the standards of the former must not become incompatible with the essence of the latter. We need a minimum qualifying standard to apply to broadcast roles that have narrative-setting power, one that news organizations can apply to everyone hired to deliver news on air. But as an example, no web page on NBC News talks about such minimum qualifying standards. The goal of a standard would be to guard against the “sourcing of diverse viewpoints” norm from being taken hostage by anti-democratic forces.

No one claims that this is easy. But a problem not called out is one that will never be solved.

Let’s start with the qualifying political field, for which Conde used the words “political spectrum.” This term is overly broad. It includes everyone trying to make inroads to win power at any cost. Democracies are meant to sustain and grow from contestation and discourse battles, but a democratic political spectrum is different from an arbitrary one. Political actors in a democracy, to be called democratic, ought to submit themselves to some elementary qualifying criteria. This is where an interconnection to journalism is possible. Such criteria could then also apply to news media roles.

So where must we find such criteria? Here is one straw man. While this is one approach, there will be many other ideas.

Talking on Kettering Foundation’s democracy podcast, Harvard political scientist Steven Levitsky reminds people of an existing scholarly consensus that defines democracy at a bare minimum: Free and fair elections, universal adult suffrage, and protection of civil liberties. Commitment to free elections would include accepting the verdict of a fair election. News media companies could use these three criteria itself as a standard and apply them consistently to hiring people who will come on air to talk or produce the news.

It is important to note that diverse factions in our society already agree with these three tenets of democracy and democratic power transfer. So hiring of news producers and contributors can be done without violating such a minimum standard. The unstated implication of NBC’s reversal after the on-air revolt is that the network’s top anchors implied a need for a standard. So let’s have that written and justified.

Otherwise, we have had the revolt, but no revolution to favor democracy.