Biden’s champions on US news channels could help Trump win
It takes a special kind of stupidity to make the media appear worse than the politicians when it comes to being egregiously out of touch. In the week when Donald Trump tried to claim poverty whilst floating his (grossly inflated) multi-billion-dollar social media company, whilst touting a Trump Bible (only a few weeks after selling the Trump Sneakers), it’s NBC that looks like the real chumps here, after throwing $300,000 a year at their latest contributor.
The newly hired Ronna McDaniel, the former Chairperson of the Republican Party, became the newly fired Ronna McDaniel this week after high-profile names on the news network raised their heads above their situation desks to criticise her appointment.
Even arch loyalist Rachael Maddow spoke out against her paymasters. “The fact that Ms. McDaniel is on the payroll at NBC News, to me that is inexplicable,” she said. “I hope they will reverse their decision.”
And reverse it they did with NBCUniversal News Group chair, Cesar Conde, finally accepting “the legitimate concerns” only four days after McDaniel’s hiring. “No organization, particularly a newsroom, can succeed unless it is cohesive and aligned,” he went on to say. “Over the last few days, it has become clear that this appointment undermines that goal.”
There’s no indication yet that NBC will find cause not to pay her what they agreed to pay given they had no obvious grounds for terminating her contract. But hey! What’s $600,000 (the price of her two-year contract) between friends in what often appears to be the world’s most incestuous media bubble?
There’s a lot that could be written about the naïve way America’s news networks are struggling to expand their viewership by arrogantly thinking that a move to the right will not shed viewers from the left. It hasn’t worked for CNN and is even less likely to work for NBC. But what’s more shameful is that the money made available to hire McDaniel on a part-time basis was not available when the network shed the full-time jobs of less high-profile workers in January. It appears that even in a struggling news climate, there’s still money to be made for those at the very top.
It’s the kind of fiscally rash act that exposes the channel’s habitual weakness; an institutional lack of self-awareness that is often apparent in the programming. Over on MSNBC, the more liberal channel operating under the peacock banner, each day begins with the show Morning Joe, hosted by the married couple Mika Brzezinski and Joe Scarborough. Brzezinski is political royalty: the daughter of Jimmy Carter’s National Security Advisor, Zbigniew Brzezinski, and sister to the US Ambassador to Poland. She has made a name for herself for, among other things, becoming the victim of some of Trump’s cruellest jibes. She is also extremely well connected in New York and Washington and works to empower women through her “Know Your Value” project, whose annual summit (in association with Forbes) is held in that bastion of women’s rights (checks notes), Abu Dhabi.
As a form of advocacy, it is noticeably based around an ultra-rich socialite set, though very much on brand for the network. This, after all, is the same show that employs financial contributor, Steve Rattner, the chairman of Willett Advisors which manages Michael Bloomberg’s fortune. Rattner’s wealth is estimated to be around half a billion and he regularly phones in contributions about the state of people’s finances from (checks notes again), his Matisse Room.
It’s a crass lack of self-awareness that gives some credence to Donald Trump’s portrayal of the media as speaking down to ordinary Americans. The fact that Trump continues to get traction among many voters simply because they believe he best represents them is a failure of both Democrats and Biden to make the case that it’s Biden who more closely shadows the fortunes of America’s middle class. It was Biden who was born into relative prosperity until financial hardship hit his family. Trump, on the other hand, son of a billionaire, has somehow managed to convince people that he is ordinary.
It would be a difficult paradox to reconcile except for the bad judgement of Democrats, whether it’s their over-reliance on super-rich Hollywood to provide endorsements during the political season, or in the case of the McDaniel appointment, showing rank hypocrisy towards some employees than others.
It also, incidentally, makes similar bad judgements in British politics seem mild by comparison. Here in the UK this week, listeners to LBC were rightly appalled when Rachel Johnson claimed that having £600 a week is “not very much” when it comes to disposable income. It was a moment indicative of a larger malaise around this government, a sense in the country that Westminster no longer speaks for people who are feeling the bite of a stagnant economy. This is how Lee Anderson got the moniker “30p” after suggesting that people could live on low-price meals. It’s the sickness of a government run by the super-wealthy proclaiming the virtues of cost-cutting.
In the US, there’s less sense of government being that out of touch, but the NBC story does highlight a weakness of many on the left, and around the Democratic Party, usually going into elections. The pundits on the liberal media froth about economic disparities but routinely ignore their complicity. In the case of MSNBC, the channel that once tried to brand itself as “America’s News Channel” no more speaks for ordinary Americans than does Fox News. With friends like them, it’s understandable if Joe Biden doesn’t need any new enemies.
The continuing challenge for Democrats this year is to prove that they have the candidate who has most in common with blue-collar America (Biden has been termed “the most pro-union president in history”), and less in common with his champions in the media whose outrage is conspicuously absent whenever ordinary American jobs are lost in their newsrooms. They might have disliked McDaniel (with some good reason) for her involvement in Trump’s efforts to undermine American democracy. It would be healthier if they could have expressed similar judgments about the kind of money wasted in this whole sorry incident, but that, of course, might have involved a few too many tough questions about the huge disparities between those at the very top and the very bottom of network news.
@DavidWaywell
Write to us with your comments to be considered for publication at letters@reaction.life