Led by NBC, U.S. corporate media is learning to live with Trump

For weeks before NBC News journalists exploded into open revolt Sunday over the network’s hire of a top Donald Trump supporter, the media company that controls three of the top U.S. news networks had been quietly rebuilding its ties to the former president.

Network insiders noticed on March 5, when, during MSNBC’s Super Tuesday broadcast of Trump’s primary wins, host Rachel Maddow indicated to producers off-camera that viewers had heard enough from the former president. MSNBC president Rashida Jones told production staff that she wanted to stay with his speech. Maddow mused live about the challenges of taking Trump’s comments on the fly and “allowing somebody to knowingly lie on your air.”

Six days later, CNBC welcomed the former president back to Squawk Box for a phone-in interview primarily conducted by right-leaning host Joe Kernen.

And while those decisions were handled cordially inside the network, tensions flared when NBC News told the New York Times on Friday that it had hired former Republican National Committee chair Ronna McDaniel as an on-air commentator. The move was the culmination of a few weeks of discussions spearheaded by NBC News senior political vice president and its editorial president Rebecca Blumenstein, with signoff from MSNBC leadership and NBCUniversal news chief Cesar Conde, according to a company official.

The hiring was despite McDaniel’s previous public criticism of MSNBC and NBC News’ coverage of Trump and Republican politics. Her team at the RNC refused to let MSNBC simulcast the 2024 GOP primary debate hosted on NBC News.

“Our bosses owe you an apology for putting you in this situation,” former Meet The Press host Chuck Todd said to his successor, Kristen Welker, of the McDaniel drama during Sunday’s broadcast.

The rings of leadership involved in approving McDaniel is an indication that they knew hiring her would be a controversial move that the network would have to defend. Liberal viewers have created memes mocking the decision, and media critics said the network was further whitewashing McDaniel’s role in the events that culminated in the Capitol riot on Jan. 6, 2021.

McDaniel acknowledged on Meet the Press that the 2020 election was legitimate.

“Joe Biden won. He’s the president,” she said. “He’s the legitimate president.” And yet, she added: “I have always said and I continue to say there were issues in 2020.”

McDaniel’s move from politics to news isn’t unusual by standards of American television history. MSNBC’s biggest rising star is Jen Psaki, Biden’s loyal former White House press secretary. And while there are big personalities at play, this 2024 story has less to do with old-fashioned NBC personnel drama and more with inexorable political and economic forces.

Behind the move is the reality that is sinking in for U.S. corporate media, and corporate America in general: They may soon be dealing again with a Trump administration, willing to use the tools of government to reward allies and punish enemies. For the great publicly traded conglomerates like NBCUniversal Media’s parent, Comcast, that may leave little choice but to extend an olive branch to the former president.

Companies like Comcast, Disney, and WarnerMedia, which dominate U.S. television, got an object lesson in presidential revenge during the last Trump administration. Trump reportedly demanded that the Justice Department sue to block the merger of AT&T and Time Warner. (The lawsuit failed, though the merger also quickly unraveled.)

Executives are concerned at the possibility that Trump could take revenge on the company, a high-profile NBC employee told Semafor.

Late last year, the former president explicitly raised the prospect of taking regulatory or investigative action against NBC and Comcast. While he characteristically did not provide specific details about how he would go after the company, antitrust questions aside, the government can slow or stop mergers, or attack parent companies’ other interests, as Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis did when he went after Disney’s local tax and regulatory arrangements.

While all that speculation may seem far-fetched, it’s worth stepping to ask why NBC would take a risky, dramatic step that could alienate much of its audience and staff.

All of the cable networks have taken a post-Trump administration ratings dip. But MSNBC has been able to weather the storm better than CNN, maintaining decent audience ratings in its primetime hours. Still, NBCU leadership seems willing to test the loyalty of its viewers and its hosts and staff by putting Trump on the air and paying McDaniel.

Over the weekend, Jones and her deputies fielded calls and texts from nearly all of the network’s personalities, and reassured them that despite the New York Times article saying that McDaniel would appear on MSNBC to talk about the election, she in fact would not be featured on the channel. Two people familiar with the conversations said that she told senior network staff that there was “no expectation” that McDaniel would appear on the network. NBCU officials have sought to slightly re-interpret Jones’ private comments, telling the Washington Post and Deadline that network executives called anchors to “reassure them that they maintain editorial independence over their shows and are free to book — or not book — whatever guest pundits they please.”

NBC and MSNBC are not alone in their struggles with how to cover Trump’s ascent back to the top of the Republican party post-Jan. 6 — a choice that may be partly about mollifying Trump, and partly about re-evaluating whether blacking him out has actually made their audiences better informed. CNN has begun taking Trump live on television again, while new Twitter owner Elon Musk welcomed back the former president to the since-renamed platform X.

Earlier this year, Semafor first published the story reporting that ABC News president Kimberly Godwin emailed staff privately, saying that Trump’s recent comments about Black people were “as racist as they come.” But when Semafor reached out to the network about Godwin’s remarks, a spokesperson walked them back, saying they were “part of a larger editorial conversation” about how to cover Trump. When the network discussed Trump’s comments on- air, it was more cautious, saying the remarks were “widely criticized as racist.”

Fox News, in fact, has kept Trump at arm’s length. After forking over $787 million to Dominion Voting Systems as part of a defamation settlement, the network aired pre-taped interviews with Trump (in recent months, the network began taking the former president live again).

• McDaniel partially secured her job by building a relationship with NBC senior vice president Carrie Budoff Brown during the primary debate planning process.
• The conflict over McDaniel has colored an otherwise impressive record of political coverage at NBC News. The television news organization and its digital counterpart broke a number of major stories about the 2024 presidential primary, including Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis’ campaign announcement with Elon Musk, infighting within the major super PAC supporting DeSantis for president, and the Dean Philips-linked robocall imitating Biden that showed how AI could be used to confuse voters.
• Democratic National Committee Chair Jaime Harrison blasted McDaniel’s hiring on Sunday, saying in a statement: “There should be no debate about the truth in our political discourse. Ronna McDaniel is a proven liar, and has no place in an honest and objective conversation about the future of this country.”

An earlier version of this story misstated the title of Cesar Conde, the Chairman of the NBCUniversal News Group. Also, McDaniel did not delete tweets critical of NBC, which are still on X.