The decision by NBC News to hire Ronna McDaniel, the former chair of the Republican National Committee, as a political commentator set off a round of sharp criticism from her new colleagues in recent days. Leading on-air figures at NBC and its cable cousin, MSNBC, including Chuck Todd and Rachel Maddow, took the unusual step of condemning their bosses’ decision in public.
Those internal critics have said that by hiring Ms. McDaniel, the network was authorizing election denialism. In the days after the 2020 election, Ms. McDaniel promoted some false theories pushed by then-President Donald J. Trump, including that votes had been miscounted in key battleground states, and she helped pressure election officials in one Michigan county to hold off from certifying the results. She has since tried to downplay her role in questioning the integrity of the election, and on Sunday, she said on “Meet The Press” that President Biden had defeated Mr. Trump “fair and square.”
Many mainstream news organizations have focused on the internal tensions at NBC. But the uproar at the network has played out differently among many conservative commentators, who have argued that it shows how the journalists at NBC News are overwhelmingly liberal and intolerant of conservative views.
Fox News
In one segment, after playing clips in which Mr. Todd and the MSNBC hosts Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski described their opposition to Ms. McDaniel’s hire on the air, panelists on the Fox News show “America’s Newsroom” expressed incredulity at the backlash.
“If somebody said this at Fox News, they’d be walked out the door,” said Bill Hemmer, an anchor of the show.
“I was really disappointed to hear Chuck Todd, someone who is a journalist, comment on this in that fashion,” said Kayleigh McEnany, a co-host of the Fox show “Outnumbered” and a White House press secretary under Mr. Trump. “Who at your network, NBC or MSNBC, represents the 46.7 percent of the country that tells the RealClearPolitics average, when you look at the polls, that they support Trump?”
