America This Week, March 29, 2024: "MSNBC Loses Its Nose Over Ronna"

All right, welcome to America This Week, I'm Matt Taibbi.

I'm Walter Kern.

Walter, what's up?

Nothing, I'm here in Montana. I haven't traveled for a couple of weeks in a row, which is rare. I wake up every morning, it's that Montana spring, when you don't know, if you look out the door, whether it will be summer or whether it will be December again.

Right.

Yeah, and so it's been snowing, I've been holed up in a mountain cabin doing some writing, waiting for the world to reawaken, and I'm feeling good, getting ready for a big year. Every week. I feel like we're just about to start, you know, the weirdness in earnest, but I think we finally have. I mean, the election weirdness, the crisis, the crisis of democracy.

It's a little like Lost Season 4, like I feel like we're about to have the full-blown melee, you know, we're preparing for the Cross Island confrontation, but it just hasn't happened yet.

Yeah.

So being holed up in a mountain cabin. writing sounds pretty good, I approve of that, that's awesome.

in Baltimore.

Well, yes, but that's just America falling apart, which is, I mean, that's an ongoing.

Right, it's true at this point.

Didn't you guys have a thing 10 years ago on Spy, where you would pretend to have predicted stuff?

I don't remember that feature, but I did not predict the bridge collapse, but I think I'm pretty sure that there will be more such events. Great.

Well, there was Charlottesville. that happened right after that, right? And then, I'm trying to think of what else went on right around that time. Anyway, well.

Yeah, somebody has to come out with a calendar of all the craziness that's happened, so that we can situate ourselves in time.

I've actually tried to do that. I've tried to do like a full chronology of all the sort of detours into a reality that we've taken. But it takes too long. By the time you get to a third of the way through, you know, a far too significant amount of time has passed, and you can never finish the thing. It's like Zeno's Paradox, like you can never actually get to the end of that.

Because there's no pause long enough for you to summarize the chronology up to that point. Right. Just when you're starting to orient yourself, you know, they spin the top again. Right.

Right.

Same here, I was in a mountain cabin, and only in the last day have I acquainted myself with the uprising at MSNBC.

Yeah, so this one actually prompted me to go back and smoke weed again, because some of the video was so funny that I wanted to see if I could get through without laughing.

And MSNBC host and eminence Grease, Laurence O'Donnell, made special reference to the fact that she seems to have dropped that Romney name while she was running the Republican.

Well, maybe we should start with Laurence. I mean, or do we have to start with Rachel? I don't know.

I think we have to start with Rachel only because she sort of operated as the kingpin or orchestra conductor of this particular mini scandal.

Right, right.

The person who is the head of the Republican Party during Donald Trump's time in office and during his effort to throw out the election result and stay in power anyway, and during his effort to run for election again after having done that.

OK, we can pause here. I'm going to go ahead to the part later where she talks about.

The.

The heroic uprising of MSNBC against NBC. But in the meantime, Walter, what are your observations about any of this?

Well, my metaphor for this. OK, every once in a while there's a doctor or someone at in Antarctica who gets sick or has a tumor and is forced to do surgery on themselves. This was MSNBC, acting as though it had found a growth in its bosom and took a knife and cut it out and declared itself healed. It was a cross between an exorcism and a self-surgery for cancer. They made themselves the heroes of a story that need to have existed in the first place, causing me to wonder if they really meant to hire her sincerely, or if this was all a play.

She's like a cut above Liz Cheney to.

Right. Exactly. But MSNBC used her. You know, used her in this Greek tragedy as as the cancer on the empire that is thrown out, and then all as well. And it was a Greek tragedy because they all operated as a chorus against one person.

It was awesome. I mean, it was just. it was across the board. And these videos will live on YouTube forever. Just just quickly, let's, let's go back to Rachel talking about the heroic resistance of MSNBC to NBC.

But we do defend ourselves as an institution. Not because we're personally offended by the way that we're treated, but because a free and uncowed press is necessary for our democracy. A free and uncowed press is part of our system of government. We stand up for ourselves as a way of standing up for our country and for our Constitution, the First Amendment, which makes it possible for us to exist.

Now they care about the to exist at all.

Matt, we we would disappear.

Hang on a second. Hang on a second. Yes, we would.

I mean, the. the rhetoric can't soar any higher. Right. Our very existence as molecular structures depends on the First Amendment, which, let's not forget, these people have been trashing with their other hand consistently when it comes to supposed purveyors of misinformation and disinformation. But nevertheless, now they are the last lone defenders of the First Amendment.

It's amazing. So she's going to go on and talk about. in defense of the First Amendment. We, we showed up the bosses. Here we go.

Yeah.

And so I want to associate myself with all my colleagues, both at MSNBC and NBC News, who have voiced loud and principled objections to our company, putting on the payroll someone who hasn't just attacked us as journalists, but someone who is part of an ongoing project to get rid of our system of government.

So, if you think that that's that, maybe that was like an accidental overhype. Right. Like we hired somebody who was actually trying to overthrow the United States.

A couple of hours ago, NBC News announced that Ronna Romney McDaniel, a former chairperson.

I'm sorry.

Look at that. The attack on democracy, which happened in our own house when we hired Ronna Romney McDaniel. I lost it when I saw that.

Dude, the uprising, the uprising, they saved. they saved democracy. Rachel would suggest that they may have saved our very existence. And here they are. I mean, reporting on.

I mean, the real story is our ratings suck so bad that we turned our faces all the way inside out to hire somebody. we couldn't stand. And that actually we thought that we might have been able to put that over on our staff. But it didn't work out. So now we're going to take credit for saving humanity.

Hi.

I looked at this and I spit out everything I was trying to drink at the time. Here we go.

A couple of hours ago, NBC News announced that Ronna Romney McDaniel, former chairperson of the Republican National Committee, will not be a contributor to the network. This comes just four days after NBC News announced her hiring as a political analyst. As you might know, we don't have a show on weekends or Mondays. Between then and now, I've been closely following the news and talking to lots of people inside the company. And most of what I wanted to say about all this has already been said very well by my colleagues, from people like Chuck Todd and Joe Scarborough.

Okay. Let's hear from some of those folks.

Can we pause just for a sec, Matt?

Yes. Absolutely. Yes.

Back to my Greek chorus comment. There they are in tiny little boxes like the Hollywood Squares, that old game show. All ready to throw their stones. This is the lottery.

I'm sorry. Nicole Wallace. Look at the box in the upper right there.

Right.

I mean, didn't she sell us on the Iraq War that this exact audience couldn't stand? That wasn't a red line. we couldn't cross?

And there's Rachel, chief proponent of the Russiagate Trump taxes investigation.

Morning Joe was Chuck Todd.

This is their all-star team, putting down a revolution that was within the company and presenting it as the biggest news of our time. I mean, Hayes there said that even on the days he wasn't working, he was following closely the developments. I can just see him at home, you know, his wife asking questions about the New York Times crossword puzzle. And he says, not now, honey.

I just got a text.

Yeah, I just got a text about the McDaniel affair.

OK, so let's let's try Lawrence.

Look at that jaw, look at the head of that mouth. It's General Patton himself, right?

I used to like Lawrence, but mainly because I thought I would actually sometimes do that show. Like when I was a guest, like I would be high on MSNBC. And I used to think maybe he was, too. So, like, I used to feel kind of brightened. That's probably not true, but.

Well, there was a time when Sunday morning TV. Belonged to my friend, Tim Russell.

You can see where this is going, right? But go ahead. Yeah.

Well, two things. Three things. Why did he identify him as a chain smoker? That will never be explained. It's just one of those.

It's a cliche.

Yeah. Yeah. But what he's doing is he's defending, before he moves on to his main point. He's defending the interplay, the crossover between the press and politics, by saying, you know, we would have had no Franklin Roosevelt if it wasn't for a reporter. So.

Right. And I'm sorry, I know I shouldn't keep harping on this, but. The big development in news, especially since, like, say, the late 2000s, right? Like the beginning of the Obama years, has been this infiltration of the news business by law enforcement and federal law enforcement intelligence officials. Every time you look up, it's Frank Figliusi or John Brennan, or John Clapper, or Phil Mudd, or Asha Rangappa or Stephen Hall, Samantha Vinograd, John Brennan, right?

And they and they have, and they've also, let's not forget, been hiring overtly political figures, you know, from Paul Begala, Carville to Saki. Yeah, I'm having a bad moment. Nicole Wallace, the Bush, the Bush adviser, the sort of wizard of the right.

Oh, Turd Blossom. What's his name? Karl Rove or.

Yeah, Karl Rove or Steve Schmidt.

Right. And, by the way, there's a major I mean, it's a not insignificant ethical issue with hiring people like John Brennan and John Clapper in the middle of something like, for instance, Russiagate. They are in the middle of stories they are going to be commenting on. Right. And if you don't, if you don't tell your audience that you are crossing a line far worse than anything they could possibly be doing with the Ronald McDaniel thing like that, that is something that you would you could never have done, let's say, 25 years ago in journalism without incurring all kinds of wrath.

But but but Lawrence O'Donnell, being intelligent, knows that. Rather than defend that practice, which he's not going to defend, he should celebrate that practice in general. It gave us FDR and and then he goes on to celebrate the dead. You knew this was a full scale Broadway production when they invoked the sainted Chuck Todd. It's, it's I mean, excuse me, Tim Ross, who is to NBC.

Sorry, go ahead. Yeah.

Just to show, you know, a picture of the saint on the wall, but also to suggest that his relationship with a guy named Stuart Stevens, who is one of, I think, Romney's campaign officials, was a wonderful model of how. The objective press and. You know, outright politicos should relate to each other, you know, so, in other words, what his assignment was in the chorus was to. Make this bad business of hiring spies. and, you know, political consultants.

Cut. Cause and then cut out. So, yeah. So let's, let's go back to Lawrence just for a second, just because he actually ends up segwaying to Chuck. So that that that makes it funny.

There have been no President Roosevelt. Without Lewis, how?

Welcome. Sorry. Just just to. Make clear that that was the difference. back in the day.

Now, I'm biased, but I think Tim was the best moderator of Meet the Press or any Sunday show ever. No one ever questioned Tim Russert's fairness and objectivity, even when he was interviewing his former boss. And I have a feeling Tim Russert would have been cheering for his former protege and friend Chuck Todd yesterday. After Meet the Press.

There is no logic to what he just said. None at all.

One would think, but he's going somewhere else with this. But yes, one would think that. I also like the fact that. He he doesn't say Tim Russert yesterday was smiling when he said would have because he didn't want to appear religious. But.

And I have a feeling Tim Russert would have been cheering for his former protege and friend, Chuck Todd yesterday. After meet the press in the press interview of the former Republican Party chair, Ronald McDaniel, who was hired as a paid contributor at NBC News last week. I think our bosses owe you an apology for putting you in this situation, because I don't know what to believe. She is now a paid contributor by NBC News. I have no idea whether any answer she gave to you was because she didn't want to mess up her contract.

Many of our professionals.