So You Want to Hire a Conservative Commentator...

After the Ronna McDaniel fiasco at NBC, how can news orgs find principled conservatives worth publishing and airing?

Donald Trump and Ronna McDaniel. (Photo by Mandel Ngan / AFP via Getty Images)

YOU HAVE TO DRAW THE LINE SOMEWHERE, and where if not at the Big Lie?

If the Ronna McDaniel saga were a miniseries or magazine piece, it would be called “The Five-Day Tenure of a Great Get”: It starts last Friday when NBC News announces that it has hired the former chairwoman of the Republican National Committee as a political commentator. A massive backlash ensues, led by the network’s on-air talent, over McDaniel’s role in trying to reverse the 2020 election results, her year of denying them, and her continued attempts to undermine them. Okay, maybe not that great a get. By Tuesday, she’s out.

We live in complicated media times, and mistakes are constantly made—even now. They’ve been made since 2015 and the struggle will continue as long as Donald Trump is a dominant presence in American life.

I’ve been through it on the inside, and the McDaniel debacle brought back a lot of memories. The hardest journalism job I’ve ever had was being commentary editor of USA Today during “the reign of Donald Trump and his loyalists’ deadly attack on the Capitol to try to keep him in power,” as I called it in a 2021 interview. “Handling op-eds during this period was the challenge of a lifetime. I’ve never been so familiar with the Constitution, the Federalist Papers, the criminal code and the unique angst of fact-checking in the Trump era.”

As that era continues to drag on, so do the challenges. And let’s be blunt: This is an asymmetrical problem. With so many Republicans tethered to Trump, MAGA, and their self-serving fictions, how do you showcase conservative voices while maintaining professional standards of truth, reality, and facts that aren’t “alternative”?

At USA Today, our editing team of liberals and conservatives tried like hell to do both. We had conservative regulars, conservative guest columnists, and first-person essays by conservatives. One column I edited mentioned the “liberal mob” and I remember chuckling at the phrase—it was an opinion, and the author was certainly entitled to it. I also remember fact-checking a Joe Biden op-ed during his 2020 campaign, and it was not difficult—because there were facts in it, and they were confirmable.

Most if not all traditional news outlets want very much to publish viewpoints across the ideological spectrum. David Mastio, my center-right editor and immediate boss at USA Today, used to mock-sigh as he told me that “You do ‘wrong’ so well.” He did, too, from my center-left perspective.

A commitment to viewpoint diversity is part of a business model, of course, but it’s also part of a fairness model—and a way to sharpen readers’ thinking, as well as our own. Whatever the motivation for this commitment, it can be difficult to maintain in our fraught media moment: the ongoing clashes over evidence and reality make it easy for a journalist or manager or organization to get into trouble.

I saw it when a conservative friend lost a job over insisting on facts in a commentary about Trump—by a pro-Trump writer. We all saw it when CNN aired a live Trump town hall with a cheering audience and an outgunned moderator, reviewed by the network’s own media writer as “a spectacle of lies.” And don’t even get me started about the time the news section of USA Today fact-checked a high-level Trump official’s “opposing view” to a USA Today editorial. (Spoiler: It was Peter Navarro, who reported to prison last week to serve four months for contempt of Congress.)

The temptation to hire big names like McDaniel is understandable, especially if—like NBC News—you have $300,000 lying around to pay her. Trump himself had the occasional byline on our page, and he was fact-checked. Vice presidential nominee Mike Pence wrote the “opposing view” in 2016 when the editorial board, breaking with USA Today tradition, said Trump was “unfit for the presidency.” Pence also wrote it in 2020 after we went even further and endorsed Biden—the first time in the paper’s history that the board endorsed a presidential candidate.

That election was, or should be, a line of demarcation. Before the Big Lie, and after it. Before the January 6th Capitol attack, and after it.

My 2021 Christmas wish was zero tolerance for the Big Lie, Stop the Steal crowd in Congress. I laid it all out in a column that ran with the headline “Oust Trump coup planners, enablers and provocateurs from public office. They betrayed us.” But they’re still there, from House Speaker Mike Johnson on down.

There’s nothing news organizations can do about that, or about Trump’s current starring roles as presumptive GOP presidential nominee and defendant in his many criminal and civil trials, or about the endless dilemma of when and how and whether to cover him in year nine of his lies and outrages.

What they can do, at the very least, is stop rewarding Big Lie opportunists like McDaniel.