Dan Rather enters the NBC-McDaniel dispute, poised to undermine media trust

Newsman Dan Rather, who knows personally about losing credibility, slammed NBC’s hiring of former Republican National Committee Chairwoman Ronna McDaniel, charging that her pro-Trump bias will erode the public’s trust in media.

“Allowing McDaniel to be in the same area code as NBC News is a huge mistake and will only further shred the small amount of trust Americans still have in the mainstream media,” Rather said on his Substack Steady.

“One wonders what the hell executives at the network were thinking,” he added.

Rather titled his post “Journalism Lesson #1 for 2024” and used it to slay NBC news executives, specifically Carrie Budoff Brown, senior vice president of politics, who had said of the recent hire, “It couldn’t be a more important moment to have a voice like Ronna’s on the team.”

Her team famously disagreed. On Monday, Morning Joe hosts Joe Scarborough and his wife Mika Brzezinski said they would bar McDaniel from their show. Chuck Todd went on his former show, Meet the Press, to blast Brown’s newest hire.

Rather just piled on and even provided a list of McDaniel’s “misdeeds,” mostly supporting former President Donald Trump.

“During her tenure, she was a prolific fundraiser yet oversaw the net losses of Republican governorships and congressional seats. But her biggest claim to fame during her seven years on the job is that she was a Trump supporter, loyalist, and apologist above all else,” Rather said.

“One could argue that this is the role of the head of a political party: to support the highest-ranking member of said party. Yes, that is typically true. But McDaniel spent years repeating Trump’s disinformation, making cases for his lies and paying his legal bills,” he added.

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Some could argue that it was Rather’s questionable reporting about former President George W. Bush that supercharged the public’s loss of confidence in the media. Rather, 92, followed Walter Cronkite into the top CBS News job in 1981. He left in 2004 after his negative reporting on former President George W. Bush’s military service was debunked.

But he said the business of the media is to blame now.

“News gathering is a business, as unfortunate as that is. As a business, it needs to make money. In television news, more viewers equals more money. So news organizations feel they need to appeal to the broadest spectrum of viewers possible,” he said, adding, “The mainstream middle is a much more crowded field that is bombarded by accusations of bias and liberalism. So they feel the need to show their Republican bona fides by hiring conservative voices.”