By Jason Cohen, The Daily Caller News Foundation | March 27, 2024
NBC hosts criticized their network for hiring former RNC Chairwoman Ronna McDaniel because of her alleged dishonesty, but they gave credence to falsehoods in recent years.
NBC hosts called out McDaniel for saying the 2020 election was unfair against former President Donald Trump. However, they boosted falsehoods on hot-button issues, including that Trump and Russia colluded to swing the election to the former president in 2016.
“The issue isn’t about ideology, it’s about basic truth,” NBC’s Chuck Todd posted about McDaniel on X Monday. “Those trying to make this a left-right issue are being intentionally dishonest. This is about whether honest journalists are supposed to lend their credibility to someone who intentionally tried to ruin ours.”
Todd had Democratic California Rep. Adam Schiff on his show “Meet The Press” in 2017 to discuss alleged collusion between Trump and Russia during the 2016 election.
“There is circumstantial evidence of collusion,” Schiff told Todd. “There is direct evidence, I think, of deception and that’s where we begin the investigation.”
Former White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki negotiated her deal with MSNBC before leaving the Biden administration. Psaki criticized comparisons between her and McDaniel on air Monday.
“Look, this is not about Republicans versus Democrats,” she said. “This is not about red versus blue. This is about truth versus lies. Service to the country versus service to one man committed to toppling our democratic system,” Psaki added. “That is the type of experience that Ronna McDaniel brings to the table and that experience does not get us to a deeper understanding of anything in the public debate.”
Psaki advanced 2020 reporting in the lead-up to the presidential election that the Russian government paid bounties to kill American soldiers, an allegation that the Biden administration eventually said is based on inconclusive intelligence.
MSNBC host Nicolle Wallace said on air that McDaniel’s hiring signals to people who criticized the fairness of the 2020 election, “not just that they can do that on our airwaves, but that they can do that as one of us, a badge-carrying employee of NBC News, as a paid contributor to our sacred airwaves.”
Wallace hosted former CIA Chief of Staff Jeremy Bash on for a segment where he said Hunter Biden’s laptop appeared to be a “Russian disinformation campaign.” Bash was one of the 51 former intelligence officials who signed and published a letter casting doubt on the laptop.
The Daily Caller News Foundation authenticated a key email from the laptop in October 2020 after receiving a copy of the device from former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani.
“I know I felt very strongly about it,” MSNBC host Joy Reid said on Tuesday about McDaniel’s hiring, adding she was “grateful” for the network firing her and calling it “the right decision.” NBC News announced Tuesday that it was letting go of McDaniel after pushback from pundits over her hiring.
Reid previously pushed the falsehood that Border Patrol agents used “whips” from the “slave era” to herd migrants at the border in 2021. A border patrol agent informed Fox News the alleged “whips” were horse reins.
MSNBC’s Mika Brzezinski and Rachel Maddow called on NBC News to “reconsider” their choice of hiring her, accusing the network of enabling McDaniel to proliferate lies regarding the 2020 election. McDaniel participated in a call with Michigan election officials during her time as RNC chair to urge them to not certify votes cast for now-President Joe Biden in the Detroit region, according to CNN.
Maddow said in March 2021 that the COVID-19 vaccine is fully effective against infection from the virus, according to Fox News.
“Now we know that the vaccines work well enough that the virus stops with every vaccinated person,” she said. “A vaccinated person gets exposed to the virus, the virus does not infect them, the virus cannot then use that person to go anywhere else.”
McDaniel made her NBC contributor debut in a Sunday interview on “Meet the Press” Sunday, where host Kristen Welker criticized her for saying that Biden did not win the 2020 election fairly.
NBC did not respond to the DCNF’s request for comment.
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