Memo to the Media: "First, Do No Harm."

"Fair and Balanced" cannot not include giving the mic to liars.

First, our sincere apologies for being offline for a couple of weeks. A convergence of family responsibilities, work demands, and health blips conspired to keep us away!

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Fair and balanced is specifically NOT presenting criminality, depravity, dishonesty as legitimate just because it is the opposite of educated, reasoned opinion and real expertise. It is not done for market share and profits. It is most especially NOT giving the microphone to people who want to destroy your country and letting them pretend they’re saying something real rather than committing fraud and treason on national TV.

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Ronna McDaniel—chair of the Republican National Committee recently booted by Donald Trump after years of proffering his lies and shoveling him money—has been handed her chapeau by NBC Universal just two days after being given a two-year contract as a paid contributor. This happened because Chuck Todd, Lawrence O’Donnell, Rachel Maddow, Joy Reid, Mika Brzezinski, Joe Scarborough and Nicolle Wallace raised hell on air. And a good thing, too. Because this woman is a really, really bad news.

Ronna’s Rap Sheet

Let’s start with …

1. The January 6th Insurrection

If there were ever a time when Republicans needed to stand up against Trump and a collection of white supremacist, misogynist, xenophobic extremist groups—which included the Three Percenters, the Proud Boys, QAnon, the Oath Keepers and 42 other hate groups—it was the day it happened and the days following. Absolutely the only redemption possible for Republicans would have been to decry the attempt by those who stormed the Capitol building and injured 160 law enforcement in the process would have been to condemn the siege instantly and vociferously. We are now more than three years later, and the Republican Party has been held hostage and largely overtaken by election deniers, with Trump himself calling “hostages” the more than 800 members, of more than 1,200 members of these groups indicted, convicted and doing jail time.

Image: National Consortium for the Study of Terrorism and Responses to Terrorism, a wing of the Department of Homeland Security.

These people did more than $1 billion damage to the Capitol, and the resulting security revamp cost $1.6 billion. In the days and weeks that followed four Capitol police committed suicide.

So what did Ronna do? First, before January 6th went down, she stoked the Big Lie that there was widespread fraud in the election of Joseph Biden in 2020, and that set the stage for attack by convincing people their country was being stolen when, as the Brookings Institute points out, there was no level of fraud that would have changed the election—and that any fraud at all was minuscule. https://www.brookings.edu/articles/widespread-election-fraud-claims-by-republicans-dont-match-the-evidence/

And Ronna? Ronna said nothing while Donald Trump screamed “Stop the steal!” in a series of provocative tweets sent on January 6th, beginning early in the morning.

January 6, 2021
06:00:50 If Vice President @Mike_Pence comes through for us, we will win the Presidency. Many States want to decertify the mistake they made in certifying incorrect & even fraudulent numbers in a process NOT approved by their State Legislatures (which it must be). Mike can send it back!
Retweets: 66961
Favorites: 289835 January 6, 2021

13:17:22 States want to correct their votes, which they now know were based on irregularities and fraud, plus corrupt process never received legislative approval. All Mike Pence has to do is send them back to the States, AND WE WIN. Do it Mike, this is a time for extreme courage!
Retweets: 62503
Favorites: 251729 January 6, 2021

13:22:26 THE REPUBLICAN PARTY AND, MORE IMPORTANTLY, OUR COUNTRY, NEEDS THE PRESIDENCY MORE THAN EVER BEFORE - THE POWER OF THE VETO. STAY STRONG!
Retweets: 66595
Favorites: 344390 January 6, 2021

14:00:12 They just happened to find 50,000 ballots late last night. The USA is embarrassed by fools. Our Election Process is worse than that of third world countries!
Retweets: 92437
Favorites: 377295 January 6, 2021

14:15:07 The States want to redo their votes. They found out they voted on a FRAUD. Legislatures never approved. Let them do it. BE STRONG!
Retweets: 69832
Favorites: 303347

Only when the mob had trashed the Capitol and sent legislators of both parties into hiding and left feces all over their desks did Trump make a request, which had all the spine of a wet noodle, for civil behavior.

Ronna did nothing. But perhaps that’s because she’d been just ever-so, ever-so busy in the previous weeks:

2. Ronna, the Fake Electors Scheme, and “Enabling Depravity”

In the run-up to certification, Trump acolytes desperately tried to convince state officials not to certify election results that came out in Biden’s favor. Ronna, ever the dutiful Trump Mafia drone, got on the phone with Michigan certification officials and, as RNC chair, outright ordered them block certification. “We’ll get you lawyers,” she promised.

Did she actually believe there was fraud? No, she didn’t. Tim Alberta of Politico nailed it down:

McDaniel told multiple confidants that she doubted there was any scalable voter fraud in Michigan. Nevertheless, McDaniel told friends and fellow Republicans that she needed to stay the course with Trump and his legal team. This wasn’t about indulging him, she said, but rather about demonstrating a willingness to fight—even when the fight couldn’t be won.

This is why McDaniel has sanctioned her employees, beginning with top spokesperson Liz Harrington, to spread countless demonstrable falsehoods in the weeks since Election Day. It’s why the RNC, on McDaniel’s watch, tweeted out a video clip of disgraced lawyer Sidney Powell claiming Trump “won in a landslide” (when he lost by more than 6 million votes nationally) and alleging a global conspiracy to rig the election against him. 

The term craven doesn’t start to commence to begin to cover this arrogance, as she quite believes that ruining the country is fine if she proves to her boss that she is a “fighter” — “even if the fight couldn’t be won.” Or perhaps the malignant narcissism for which her former boss is famous is actually caused by an infectious virus, like COVID-19, and could perhaps be treated by shooting bleach.

Editor’s Note: I’m being facetious! Do NOT for any reason whatsoever inject bleach. You will die.

And it is for this, and many other reasons, that Liz Cheney nailed McDaniel this week.

3. Ronna, the Censure of Cheney and Kinzinger, and Whitewashing January 6 as “Legitimate Political Discourse”

Of course, now Ronna’s telling a different story. But just two years ago, she was frying Liz Cheney and Adam Kinzinger for participating in the January 6th investigation that would, eventually, result in the indictments of more than 1,200 people, including Donald Trump, the first U.S. president to be indicted from a crime against the country.

Cheney and Substack’s own Kinzinger (do subscribe) stood solid against the mob violence and paid for it: Cheney lost re-election and Kinzinger resigned — and a profound part of the reason why was that Ronna McDaniel, as head of the RNC, brought Liz Cheney and Adam Kinzinger up for censure for participating in the January 6th committee, of which Cheney was vice-chair. It turned out to be the politically fatal hit job it was intended to be. McDaniel had castigated the two for investigating what she called “legitimate political discourse”—as if causing a billion in damages and threatening to hang the vice president of the United States is just having a chat over tea

However, Kinzinger has a brilliant Substack newsletter and a brilliant future, and this week Cheney may have had something like the last word. Cited in The Guardian, Cheney said:

“Ronna facilitated Trump’s corrupt fake elector plot and his effort to pressure Michigan officials not to certify the legitimate election outcome. … She spread his lies and called January 6 ‘legitimate political discourse’.”

What’s Ronna say? Ronna is saying she was just taking one for the team in supporting Trump’s attempt to overthrow the legitimately elected government of the United States. Was that what she was doing?

Cheney’s cryptic comment was:

“That’s not ‘taking one for the team’. It’s enabling criminality and depravity.””

That’s also what it was when Ronna gave Trump RNC money two years ago before he had declared himself a candidate in 2024? That’s what it was when she tried to pressure a “donation” of $500,000 from a man being proffered for Ambassador to the Bahamas and then let two hold-outs know she could get the money?

Donald Trump had Ronna McDaniel fired because Super Tuesday was an abject failure for the Republican Party in general — and because he wanted his daughter-in-law Lara Trump to have total control of the money, every penny of which she promises to give Trump. Who will need it.

Meanwhile, Ronna’s attempt to rehabilitate her reputation will fail. There’s too much of it, and it’s on record.

And what else is on record is this:

First, Do No Harm.

The shock wave that rippled through journalism with the NBC Universal contract with Ronna McDaniel was like an extinction level event. Appearing on Meet the Press, NBC’s flagship political program, which has been running since 1947, Ronna tried to walk back all of Istanbul’s one million cats in one go. She said Biden won “fair and square.” She said she did “not think violence should be in our political discourse.” God, that’s that so cute that she thinks she can lie her way out of this now.

Chuck Todd, issued an on-air protest.

“There’s a reason why there’s a lot of journalists at NBC News uncomfortable with this,” he told the current host, Kristin Welker, “because many of our professional dealings with the RNC over the last six years have been met with gaslighting, have been met with character assassination.”

It was only the beginning.

Morning Joe host and former U.S. Congressman Joe said:

“We’ve been inundated with calls this weekend, as have most people connected with this network, about NBC’s decision to hire [McDaniel]. … “We learned about the hiring when we read about it in the press on Friday. We weren’t asked our opinion of the hiring but if we were, we would have strongly objected to it for several reasons including, but not limited to, as lawyers might say, Miss McDaniel’s role in Donald Trump’s fake elector scheme and her pressuring election officials to not certify election results while Donald Trump was on the phone.”

Scarborough’s wife and co-host, Mika Brzezinski, said:

“To be clear, we believe NBC news should seek out conservative Republican voices to provide balance in their election coverage. … But it should be conservative Republicans, not a person who used her position of power to be an anti-democracy election denier. And we hope NBC will reconsider its decision. It goes without saying that she will not be a guest on Morning Joe in her capacity as a paid contributor. Here’s why.”

Later, the host, Nicole Wallace – once White House communications director for George W Bush – told viewers NBC had, by hiring McDaniel, “wittingly or unwittingly” told election deniers they could spread Trump’s lies on “our sacred airwaves”.

Yale historian Timothy Snyder, author of the book On Tyranny, said:

“What NBC has done of its own volition is bring into a very important conversation about democracy, one which is going to take place for the next seven months or so, someone who … tried to disassemble our democracy. Who personally took part in an attempt to undo the American system.”

Rachel Maddow took it home:

"To me, that is inexplicable. I mean you wouldn't ... you wouldn't hire a made man, like a mobster, to work at a [district attorney's] office, right? You wouldn't hire a pickpocket to work as a TSA screener."

And then Cesar Conde, the NBC New Group chief whose blunder this was in the first place mic-dropped the hammer:

And he did that ONLY because he had a full-blown celebrity newscaster mutiny, one worthy of the immortal Molly Ivins herself, on his hands. Joe and Mika weren’t going to have her on. And when Maddow speaks, it’s all over. Period.

But Conde didn’t do it because it was the right thing to do. He didn’t offer McDaniel $300K a year—after just letting go dozens of reporters to save money—because her presence would ensure that NBC coverage would be “fair and balanced.”

He did it for market share—for money—to draw Trump’s readership—for the sleaziest, most craven reason possible.

Robert Reich has been warning us for months that the media is off the rails—that it will pass along any lie whatever to gain viewership, even if the lies being told put a criminal in the White House again and make mush out of the brains of millions of Americans who are can’t lap up fast enough just these types of conspiracy theories that fuel their false hissy fits and phony rages and grievous-culture self-elevation and gun-toting, Viking-horn-wearing, failure-to-launch adolescence strutting about.

The media has a responsibility in what has happened in this whole last period—letting on air not legitimate conservative thinkers with valid points to make but these people who lie for political purposes and have twisted American political discourse almost beyond recognition.

“Fair and balanced” journalism is not the proffering of bald-face black lies as the “balance” of the truth. “Fair and balanced” is presenting differing—not necessarily opposite, though that’s more titillating, isn’t it?—perspectives on issues when both are coming from a place of honesty and moral validity.

It is specifically NOT presenting criminality, depravity, dishonesty as legitimate just because it is the opposite of educated, reasoned opinion and real expertise. It is not done for market share and profits. It is most especially NOT giving the microphone to people who want to destroy your country and letting them pretend they’re saying something real rather than committing fraud and treason on national TV.