3/30/2024

Posted By Tim Hains
On Date March 26, 2024

“System Update” journalist Glenn Greenwald gives his take on the outrage among MSNBC and NBC employees over the network’s decision to hire former RNC Chair Ronna Romney McDaniel:

GLENN GREENWALD: Donald Trump, whether they like it or not is the leading candidate for president in the United States in 2024. And NBC, which claims to be a news outlet, is explicitly apologizing because they hired somebody minimally associated with that campaign, even though they’re surrounded by people who came right from the Democratic National Committee and the Biden White House. They see no contradiction in that at all.

CHUCK TODD, NBC NEWS: Let me deal with the elephant in the room. I think our bosses owe you an apology for putting you in this situatio because I don’t know what to believe.

She [former RNC Chair Ronna Romney McDaniel] is now a paid contributor to NBC News. We have no idea whether any answer she gave to you was because she didn’t want to mess up her contract. She wants us to believe that she was speaking for the RNC, when the RNC was paying her.

She has credibility issues. Is she speaking for herself? Is she speaking on behalf of who is paying her? Once at the RNC she did say that, “Hey, I’m speaking for the party.” I get that. That’s part of the job. So, what about here?

GLENN GREENWALD: How is that not the same for so many of the people that they have employed on their staff? On their staff they have a former Joe Biden and Kamala Harris aide named Simone Sanders — she has her own show on MSNBC on the weekend. She came right, working from Kamala Harris and Joe Biden and then got put in MSNBC.

Jen Psaki went as the official spokesperson for the Biden White House, whose job was to lie if necessary to defend Joe Biden to having a show on MSNBC and constantly being on MSNBC, including “Meet the Press.”

They have the former head of the CIA John Brennan and a former senior FBI official and former associate director Frank Figliuzzi who is on their air all the time. These are trained liars of the US security state, and you would never see Chuck Todd ask this question.

“Well, how do we know whether, because before they said they were speaking on behalf of the Biden White House or the DNC, or the CIA or the FBI?”

What you’re seeing here is the liberal ethos that I think is so important to understand, the reason Democrats never objected to the hiring of obviously Democratic Party spokespeople, but even the heads of the CIA, the head of the FBI, the head of the NSA, all kinds of former Pentagon officials is because they don’t regard those us security state agencies as menacing or dishonest. They regard those as their benevolent allies.

Of course, they see nothing wrong with hiring the CIA director. They consider that person, a benign ally.

The CIA is who spread Russiagate, the FBI, who spread Russiagate and tried to put Donald Trump in prison. They love those agencies.

There’s only one entity, one institution in the eyes of news corporations that is a bridge too far. And that is people who are associated with the Trump-led Republican Party.

That’s it. That’s the only prism through which they understand the world.

You can put neo-cons on NBC — and they do constantly — who lied the country into war, who defended torture, and kidnapping people off the streets of Europe and sent them to Syria and Egypt to be tortured, as Nicole Wallace, the former Bush-Cheney White House spokesperson did. She has a show on MSNBC and is constantly on MSNBC.

There is no bridge too far for liberal viewers of NBC and MSNBC news and for their personalities except for the Republican Party.

Greenwald continues:

CHUCK TODD: So when NBC made the decision to give her NBC News credibility, you have to ask what she brings to NBC News.

GLENN GREENWALD: [Chuck Todd says], “We’re giving Ronna NBC News’ credibility.” What is NBC’s credibility at this point? Every poll shows there are few institutions held I lower esteem than large media corporations like NBC. The public despises these people, they don’t have any credibility in the eyes of the American people. Axios reported in 2023 that something like 12% of the public trust the American media — American television news and newspapers in particular, and believes that they lie on purpose for political ends. But in their world, they still do have credibility, they’re unaware of how much the public hates them — or they pretend it is not true.

So they’re concerned that Ronna McDaniel is going to be bequeathed with the sterling credibility that Joy Reid and Rachel Maddow and Chuck Todd and Andrea Mitchell have. People who spent the last 7 years spreading the most insane conspiracy theories that Russia was on the verge of cutting off our heat during the winter, that Donald Trump colluded with Russia to hack into the DNC emails, and that Hunter Biden’s laptop documents were Russian disinformation.

Lie after lie after lie, he still believes NBC News has some kind of credibility that Ronna McDaniel is now going to contaminate. These people live in a dream world where they are respected and loved and trusted by the public.

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