The RNC Wants Revenge on NBC

The Ronna McDaniel drama at NBC isn’t going anywhere: the Republican National Committee is threatening to restrict the network’s coverage of its presidential nominating convention in retaliation for dropping its former chair as a contributor. “Our priority is making sure this is a world-class event that allows President Trump to feature his message and vision in a fair way,” Danielle Alvarez, a spokesperson for the RNC and Donald Trump’s campaign, told Politico. “It appears that it’s up to Chuck Todd and Rachel Maddow as to whether NBC will participate in the convention since we just learned that NBC is held hostage by their ‘talent,’” Alvarez added.

Todd and Maddow, of course, had been among the prominent NBC and MSNBC on-air figures to blast executives’ decision to hire McDaniel, whose role in Trump’s election subversion efforts would have compromised the outlet’s journalistic integrity—and provided a significant platform for her MAGA cynicism at a critical moment for democracy. The internal revolt led the network to reverse course and cut ties with McDaniel after just two days. “Acknowledging that you might have got something wrong is a real sign of strength,” Maddow said after the firing. “I’m grateful that our leadership was willing to do, I think, the bold, strong, resilient thing.”

But the debacle was never going to end there: Trump and his allies, who had pushed her out as RNC chair days earlier, quickly used the dismissal as grist for their attacks on the mainstream media, weighing whether to limit NBC’s access at the GOP convention in July, though it’s unclear if and to what extent they can make good on them. Technically, credentialing for the convention is run by the House Periodical Press Gallery, which told Politico it would not revoke access based on party pressure. “[If] the publication is credentialed on Capitol Hill, and one of the parties asked that the publication not be credentialed for the convention, we would credential the publication anyway,” said Rob Zatkowski, director of the House Periodical Press Gallery. However, the RNC could, in theory, find other ways of hamstringing the network’s coverage, including restricting access to live shots, as sources familiar with the RNC’s planning told Politico.

Even if the RNC can stick it to the network at the convention, it’s unclear if it actually will. Michael Whatley, McDaniel’s successor at the RNC, told Hugh Hewitt that the party wants to use “every single available outlet to get our message out to the American people” and to shut out one of the major broadcast networks from its convention coverage could counteract that goal. The MAGA right already got what they wanted out of all this, anyway: a gift-wrapped opportunity to attack the credibility of the press. “NBC is not a business,” Fox News host Jesse Watters said this week. “It’s a political operation.” Trump wrote in one of his social media missives following McDaniel’s firing, “MSNDC FAKE ANCHORS HAVE TAKEN OVER NBC FROM CHAIRMAN BRIAN ROBERTS, AND HE DOESN’T KNOW WHAT TO DO!”