Our shitty political press has been trading credibility for access and pushing horse race coverage as news forever, so it wasn’t surprising when NBC News hired Ronna McDaniel as a paid election analyst. But it was still an outrage because she is (or at least was until the conditions attached to receiving a paycheck changed) an election denier. One line the MSM outlets kinda-sorta enforced was refusing to pay people who lie about the outcome of the 2020 election.
Chuck Todd — of all people! — called his own employer out over the weekend about the hire: (Politico)
“There’s a reason why there’s a lot of journalists at NBC News uncomfortable with this,” Todd told Welker, citing prior “gaslighting” and “character assassination” from McDaniel’s RNC.
But this paragraph from the Politico piece demonstrates how MSM outlets STILL don’t get it and perhaps never will, even with a fascist dictatorship breathing down our necks:
The on-air protests represent what could be a seminal moment in political media as news organizations continue to grapple with how to responsibly represent voices from the Trump right on their screens and in their pages without handing their platforms over to election deniers or bad faith actors who have attacked and attempted to discredit their own reporters.
Emphasis mine because it’s as impossible to “responsibly represent voices from the Trump right” in news coverage as it is to responsibly serve botulism-infused pig rectums at a restaurant. Just don’t fucking try that. Cover “the Trump right” like you’d cover a violent fascist cult, because that’s what it is.
Open thread.