The Ronna McDaniel Sh*t Show
The news industry is fundamentally broken.
by Ben Cohen
The hiring and firing of former RNC chair Ronna McDaniel from NBC News has highlighted the worst aspects the corporate news media in America.
As a general rule, I do not watch television news. I view the corporate media system in America as being fundamentally broken, and the more we pay attention to it, the worse our democracy becomes.
The major networks have been engaged in a ruthless ratings war for decades that has destroyed journalism and turned politics into a meaningless horse race. Do you like the red team? Well tune into this network and get spoon fed everything you already believe in! Do you like the blue team? Here’s an ex-White House aide turned commentator who will repeat party talking points in a fun and exciting way! Want debate? This show pits media savvy political hacks against each other in a furious battle of audience tested sound bytes!
While there are some excellent reporters and presenters who work for the main news outlets in America, the Ronna McDaniel debacle has proven yet again that the system is bankrupt.
Profit, profit, profit
Generally speaking, the news media in America has very little to do with news, and everything to do with making cash for the six conglomerates, Comcast, Disney, AT&T, Sony, Fox, and Paramount Global, that own them.
Every now and then, the corporate news system shows signs of taking the news seriously. WarnerMedia (owned by AT&T Inc.) hired former chief executive of The New York Times, Mark Thompson to run CNN last year in a bid to reverse the network’s tanking numbers. One of Thompson’s brightest ideas was to slash the ludicrous salaries of the network’s biggest stars (although it would be hard to describe Wolf Blitzer as a “star”), signaling a pivot away from personality driven news. It’s too early to tell whether the strategy is working, but it is a small glimmer of hope in a broken industry.
More often than not, the business conforms to the dictats of short term profit: create a spectacle, get eyeballs, rinse, repeat.
Enter NBC News
In perhaps the most brain dead move NBC News has ever made, the network hired 2020 election denier Ronna McDaniel as a political analyst. NBC bills itself as a serious news organization, so bringing on a woman with a long, storied track record of disgraceful lying then, is akin to JP Morgan bringing on Sam Bankman-Fried to run their investment division.
NBC journalists revolted en masse over their bosses’s decision to destroy the reputation of the network, and after only a few days, NBCUniversal News Group Chair Cesar Conde wrote to his employees informing them that Daniel was leaving.
“After listening to the legitimate concerns of many of you,” he wrote, “I have decided that Ronna McDaniel will not be an NBC News contributor.”
McDaniel is likely to receive a large payout for her troubles, and will no doubt be suing her former employer for breach of contract. The lesson to other wannabe corporate news analysts in politics is clear though: no matter how shamefully you behave, the news industry will always be a reliable cash cow when you leave. In fact, the more shamefully you behave, the more money you can make.
A sick industry
There will be more Ronna McDaniels brought onto corporate news shows in the coming years, just as there have been many Ronna McDaniels before this recent debacle. Megyn Kelly for example, was hired by NBC in 2017, then fired in 2018 after condoning blackface Halloween costumes (and walked away with a cool $69 million).
This is because corporations like NBC News ultimately answer to shareholders, and shareholders want a return on their investment. That means driving ratings at almost any cost, even if it destroys the brand in the long term.
By prioritizing conflict and ratings for short term profit, the entire industry has devolved into TV clickbait hell. Fox News doesn’t bother pretending it is a news channel any more, and hires the most controversial characters it can find to drum up ratings. The emergence of Donald Trump has made this infinitely worse. The former president attracted an army of cartoonish charlatans into his orbit, then propelled them into lucrative media careers after using and abusing them. From Anthony Scaramucci to Michael Cohen, the media has a never ending supply of controversial characters they can use to boost viewership.
News is not entertainment
As the owner of a small media company, I understand the need to make a profit. Without a business model, there can be no news industry, and business owners need to juggle extraordinarily difficult ethical quandaries when reporting on the news. If advertisers don’t like the story you are running, they can exert enormous pressure on executives to kill it. This can be overt, or implied, and over time new organizations learn what is and isn’t advertiser friendly and broadly opt not to rock the boat.
From my own experience, I believe it is possible to run a successful and ethical media organization — but not if you want to get rich. This means forgoing advertising revenue if you have to, and creating alternative sources of revenue from donations and subscription from an ethically minded audience. News organizations can be non-profits (think NPR) or subsidized by the state (the BBC). There are complicated issues with these models too — subscribers and donors can pull out if they disagree with your reporting, and governments can exert influence in an equally insidious way. But these models are infinitely preferable to the ludicrous carnival of conglomerate owned news networks that pay stars $45 million a year to spread easily disprovable lies.
The NBC staff who publicly spoke out about the decision to hire McDaniel should be commended for their integrity. They must know however, that this will happen again. With unprecedented tools to leave the confines of ratings driven entertainment news, they could actually do something about it and start their own media company. It’s a long, hard road without much in the way of material wealth, but I promise, it’s worth it.
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