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In response to yesterday’s post on Ronna X TPM Reader JG said I may be missing the true elephant in the room, and by that he means something a number of others have suggested over the last 48 hours or so. That idea is that this doesn’t have anything to do with having Ronna on the air at all. She’s there to prepare for Trump’s possible return to power, an insurance policy, as it were. There’s an additional layer of this. NBC is a big corporation with a bunch of channels and entertainment brands. But it’s part of Comcast which is a huge media and telecom conglomerate with interests across various sectors of the economy. If you’re Comcast this isn’t just a matter of NBC News or NBC. You have to worry about whether Trump is going to go to war with Comcast itself, which is vulnerable on numerous business and regulatory fronts, if he gets mad at NBC News.
I guess I thought this was implicit in what I wrote yesterday. But it definitely wasn’t my emphasis. What I was focused on yesterday was how this works when you don’t have a lawless authoritarian in the White House. But when you do, well … yes, that introduces a whole new dimension to it.
I’m not sure that’s the driver or the primary driver in this particular case. But it’s absolutely a driver in general. In fact, we need to remember that we absolutely saw this during the first Trump administration. Not just corporations proactively currying favor but the President and the White House brazenly blackmailing a major corporation to clip the wings of a big news organization. That’s what happened with ATT and CNN during the former’s acquisition of TimeWarner. It’s indirect certainly but it’s actually part of the precipitating events which led eventually to the Chris Licht/CNN dumpster fire.
Trump was Big Mad at CNN. ATT was acquiring TimeWarner which included CNN. And Trump saw an opening to create mischief to try to bring CNN to heel. No one ever quite got to the bottom of it, though there was basically a tire fire of smoke emanating from Trump’s interventions in the deal. It was also complicated by the politics of the antitrust issues involved. There are a host of very real antitrust issues with these kinds of mega-mergers. That somewhat confused the issue. People who were really into antitrust were inclined not to look to closely at what was motivating the Trump administration’s antitrust intervention. Some figured the scrutiny was good regardless of the motivations. My point in this post isn’t to get too far into the particulars about the ATT case and CNN. It’s only to note that this has already happened.
(As it happens, ATT-Time Warner turned out to be widely seen as one of the most ill-conceived mergers in decades. But that’s another issue for another day.)
Think of it this way. If you were a big corporate conglomerate with operations across the economy and you were heading into a new Trump administration, would you want one of your businesses to be news? The answer is so obvious the question sounds silly. You’d want to be as far from that as you could get if you had any choice in the matter. And since most of these company’s don’t have a choice in the matter (you can’t just unload NBC because Biden’s behind in the swing states) you’re going to want to prepare as much as possible.
Was that what was behind Ronna’s hiring? Again, I’m not certain. Some are arguing that it doesn’t make sense since Trump just canned her at the RNC and replaced her with his daughter-in-law. But that’s being way too literal. It ignores how Trump acts. Trump seldom stays mad at his toadies for very long. It’s actually hard to think of one of his big toadies he hasn’t fired or feuded with at some point. He’s mad at you until he’s not. Or he’s mad at you until you seem useful again. And the idea is that Trump would be nice because Ronna’s such a player or because he just likes her so much. If this was what NBC was trying to do it would be because she could be an interlocutor, a person to be a channel of communication. I see no reason why she might not be useful in that way. Or as useful as anyone else.
One of the things that shapes this story is something most outlets are chary of noting. Yes, she’s an election denier. But she’s also just kind of a doofus and non-entity. Am I wrong about this? In many ways that’s why she got the job and kept it for so long. I’m not saying that most partisan political operatives are philosophers or trenchant media commentators. But we’re operating here at kind of a different level. So you look at the hire and think what kind of possible insight or even insider dish are you expecting from this person other than repeating whatever the latest MAGA party line is. Hiring a Steve Bannon or some full on Trump whacko might perversely make more sense. You might be interested in what they have to say. They would probably have some real insight into the degeneracy.
Meanwhile Sara Fischer in Axios notes that a huge percentage of White House press secretaries and White House communications directors have transitioned into media gigs over the last couple decades. And amazingly there was actually a bidding war for Ronna. So we shouldn’t be thinking, what was NBC thinking. It’s just that NBC landed the prize.
So yes, this is a big issue. Was it the issue with Ronna? I’m not sure.