Ronna
McDaniels was in the picture for one episode before she was cancelled, but she is in good company.
The same thing happened to The Great One himself, Jackie Gleason,
who hosted a game show on CBS called “You’re In the Picture” that became infamous for the brevity of its run -- a single episode in 1961.
The show was so terrible that it died on arrival. The following week, Gleason appeared in the same time period to apologize.
Among other things,
he reportedly wondered aloud “how it was possible for a group of trained people to put on so big a flop.”
Maybe the same people were reincarnated as the current generation of NBC News executives who hired McDaniel as a paid political analyst.
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By the
looks of it, the trained bosses who made this high-profile, on-air hire did so without giving enough thought to the audience that matters most at NBC News -- the stars who work for them.
McDaniel served as chairman of the Republican National Committee from 2017 to earlier this month, March 8.
Last Friday, the
news broke that NBC News had hired her as a political analyst. On Sunday, she appeared on “Meet the Press” with moderator Kristen Welker (photo above).
It would turn out to be her only appearance on an NBC News show under her new title, although she had appeared on “Meet the Press” previously as a guest as recently as last
November.
Later in that very same show on Sunday, with selfless courage, former “Meet the Press” moderator Chuck Todd heroically took the lead in
denouncing McDaniel and those who hired her.
With Todd at the head of the spear, the other NBC News stars lined up behind him, most notably Joe Scarborough
and Mika Brzezinski of “Morning Joe” on MSNBC Monday morning and, later that evening, Rachel Maddow on her one weekly appearance on the cable channel.
On Tuesday, the memo went out from the tippy-top of the NBC News ladder that she was gone: Don’t worry, mean girls and boys, Ms. McDaniel will darken your doorsteps no more.
At issue was McDaniel’s relationship with Donald Trump and her alleged acquiescence in his efforts, which
have continued unabated since the 2020 elections, to undermine the legitimacy of Joe Biden’s election as President.
The NBC News stars called her an
“election denier,” a term once associated solely with those who would deny the Holocaust, but now the word “denier” has been appended to other issues such as elections and
climate change (“climate-change denier”).
But whenever TV news types leap up on their high horses to denounce others over, in this case, their
unfitness for inclusion on their hallowed TV news shows, it provides welcome amusement for the rest of us.
Chuck Todd and the rest have now denied their
company an opportunity to see if cultivating a new air talent with a point of view that differs from everybody else’s could drive an increase in viewership or drive viewers away.
Viewership still counts in the TV business, right? Allowing the chips to fall where they may is the TV version of a free marketplace.
But now, the actual viewers who make up the audience for NBC’s news content will not get a chance to vote
with their remote controls (and other devices) on the appropriateness of allowing this card-carrying conservative fox into the liberal NBC News henhouse.