Brooke Gladstone: This is On the Media. I'm Brooke Gladstone.

Micah Loewinger: I'm Micah Loewinger. We just heard from a reporter at The Lever, a small investigative outlet founded and edited by veteran journalist David Sirota, who took a break from reporting to write speeches for the Bernie Sanders presidential campaign. Many like him have passed through the revolving door between politics and the political press, some more sensitively and ethically than others. This past week, former RNC Chair Ronna McDaniel was hired and swiftly fired from NBC News. Before she got the boot, McDaniel made the case for her new role at NBC on Meet the Press, in an interview with the network's own Kristen Welker.

Kristen Welker: Do you disagree with Trump saying he's going to free those who've been charged or convicted?

Ronna McDaniel: I do not think people who committed violent acts on January 6th should be freed.

Kristen Welker: He's been saying that for months. Ronna, why not speak out earlier? Why just speak out about that now?

Ronna McDaniel: When you're the RNC Chair, you take one for the whole team. Now I get to be a little bit more myself.

Micah Loewinger: Chuck Todd, former host of Meet The Press, spoke with Welker on air about that spot with McDaniel.

Chuck Todd: 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. She wants us to believe that she was speaking for the RNC when the RNC was paying for it.

Micah Loewinger: Then, MSNBC's Rachel Maddow entered the fray.

Rachel Maddow: You wouldn't hire a made man like a mobster to work at a DA's office. [laughs] You wouldn't hire a pickpocket to work as a TSA screener, and so I find the decision to put her on the payroll inexplicable.

Micah Loewinger: Just a day after the staff revolt, McDaniel's $300,000 contract was no more. Why exactly did NBC execs think hiring McDaniel was a good idea in the first place?

Michael Socolow: I believe that she had a personal relationship with the senior executive level at NBC News and that personal relationship played a major role in the hiring.

Micah Loewinger: Michael Socolow is a professor of communication and journalism at the University of Maine.

Michael Socolow: Specifically, what Max Tani reported in Semafor is that Ronna McDaniel and an NBC News Vice President worked together closely on the Republican debates. It sounds like they got to be good colleagues and trusted, and that's what led to the offer.

Micah Loewinger: Executives presumably also hoped that McDaniel could get them better insight into top Republicans, but that's a fraught enterprise when falsehoods are commonly held party positions.

Michael Socolow: The line that she crossed essentially was election denialism. It's not simple election denialism saying that Joe Biden was illegally or illegitimately elected through fraud, she actually participated by communicating with people in Michigan in the process of subverting the democracy, the democratic deliberation of the election of 2020.

It's the difference between if somebody were to hire just a political communicator from the Nixon administration, or if they hired somebody from the Nixon administration who had actually crossed the line into illegality and was headed to jail. It's kind of that line, if you will.

Micah Loewinger: In fact, MSNBC's Lawrence O'Donnell, who by the way, started his career in politics in the '80s as an aide to US Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan condemned the hiring of McDaniel this week saying it was in violation of the so-called Nixon rule. He explained it on his show.

Lawrence O'Donnell: There is an easy way to avoid the controversy NBC News has stumbled into. Don't hire anyone close to the crimes. That's what happened to the Nixon gang, the only comparable predecessors to the Trump gang. Only the Nixon speech writers who literally worked at a different building from the White House far away from the crimes were welcomed across the line.

Michael Socolow: Yes, I think that's a fair standard. If somebody did something that is legally actionable or even constitutionally questionable, I think that is a standard that should be evaluated and thought about.

Micah Loewinger: Media critic Jack Shafer this week made a nauseating short list of some of the most notable hires from politics to media. He notes that Fox News has hired among others, Sarah Palin, Newt Gingrich, Rick Santorum, Mike Huckabee, Karl Rove, but there's also a long list of former political operatives working on other, let's say more reputable news outlets. To name a few, we've got Sarah Isgur, former Trump spokesperson was hired by ABC News in 2019, Obama advisor Van Jones rose to a huge profile at CNN.

Michael Socolow: Yes. There's Donna Brazile, George Stephanopoulos, James Carville, Symone Sanders, Jen Psaki. The list is essentially endless. It's a very common practice.

Micah Loewinger: These are all people that a news show could book for an interview or a panel. Why does CNN, or ABC, or MSNBC need to pay a former Trump spokesperson?

Michael Socolow: These people can get information from people that couldn't be gotten otherwise, and that's what you're actually paying for. Corey Lewandowski, the Donald Trump advisor was a talented and skilled political operative as much as a political communicator, and he latched onto Trump early. He had terrific access within the Trump sphere. He had got a job as a pundit for CNN after he had been charged with battery in an altercation with a reporter.

Micah Loewinger: It's one thing if you're paying David Axelrod, a chief strategist for Barack Obama, who's worked at CNN since 2015 to be a commentator, or you're paying Rick Santorum as CNN did to be a commentator. It's another, if you are paying somebody like Jen Psaki, Former White House Press Secretary to host a show. She's not just slinging takes, she's doing interviews, she's breaking down current events. Are we to believe that a former partisan whose job it was to spin the news can be really trusted to call out the spin?

Michael Socolow: Yes, we are to believe that because George Stephanopoulos is paid to do that on ABC News.

George Stephanopoulos: Former New Jersey governor, Chris Christie sat down with me for an exclusive interview, his first since dropping out of the presidential race.

Michael Socolow: I think an entire generation of TV news viewers has no idea that he worked for Bill Clinton 30 years ago and they actually see him as a journalist. I think this is one of the problems of where we are today versus where we were 30, 40 years ago. The accrued respect of somebody like an Edward R. Murrow, Walter Cronkite, a Chet Huntley, a David Brinkley, somebody who came up through the concept of news and news reporting, they wouldn't be tainted by these political operative questions or political communication, whether it's Bill Moyers or Diane Sawyer. I think you can go through a list of people who eventually did become respected journalists but came into the business through political communication.

Micah Loewinger: You mentioned Bill Moyers, who nowadays is this righteous truth teller, but before he joined CBS in the 1970s, he was doing the bidding of the Johnson administration.

Michael Socolow: That's correct. Moyers has talked about his role as a political communication specialist under Lyndon Johnson on everything from the advertisements that were ethically questionable. The very famous Daisy Ad, the Johnson campaign, basically accused Goldwater of being a nuclear madman, right up through Moyers arguing with the press about what was actually happening in Vietnam

Micah Loewinger: When he was a press secretary.

Michael Socolow: Correct. For instance, when Morley Safer in CBS News showed the American soldiers burning down a Vietnamese village, Moyers very famously tried to leak that Safer was some kind of communist.

Micah Loewinger: He said, "The irresponsible and prejudiced coverage of men like Peter Arnett and Morley Safer, men who are not American and who do not have the basic American interest at heart." Referring to journalists Arnett who was from New Zealand and Safer who's from Canada.

Michael Socolow: That's what he said in public. [laughs] In private, Moyers said a lot worse than that. Moyers has admitted his role in lying to the American public about the Vietnam War during the 1960s, and I think that's a very important standard to think about if you're hiring somebody for political communication. You could even look at Moyer's career since as penance for what he did. In other words, he took what he knowingly did as a White House press office aide, and he decided to attack it critically from the outside to make up for what he did.

Micah Loewinger: You also point to former Nixon speech writer, William Safire's hiring by The New York Times as an opinion columnist in 1973. It was treated as pretty controversial back then, right?

Michael Socolow: That's correct. Safire was a terrific speechwriter, and he was known for working with the Nixon administration and Agnew on the speeches that attacked the press

Agnew: In the United States today, we have more than our share of the nattering nabobs of negativism.

Michael Socolow: The hiring sparked a rebellion within The New York Times. People were very upset about it, especially reporters, and some of them went on the record against the hiring, but within a few years, Safire had won the Pulitzer Prize for commentary.

Micah Loewinger: Some of these big hires paved the way for the likes of Diane Sawyer, who worked on the Nixon campaign before becoming a juggernaut of ABC.

Michael Socolow: Interestingly, she stayed with Nixon after Nixon resigned, and was a real true loyalist, which made a lot of people very antsy when she was hired by CBS. People thought she was going to bring in that Nicksonian Republican perspective, but she worked with a lot of very respected journalists who had been at CBS a long time to shape the work that she was doing. She did make a conscious effort to remove her political perspective, and she did very well in establishing her journalistic reputation.

Micah Loewinger: Doesn't that prove that these people are capable of an evolution and that the original sin of working for an administration shouldn't mar you for the rest of your career?

Michael Socolow: These are very bright people. Let's be clear. They don't get these contracts unless they know how to work within organizations and know how to operate politically, whether it's Bill Moyers, whether it's Jen Psaki, and even Ronna McDaniel. You don't get to be the head of the RNC unless you can bring a lot of coalitions together, and you develop some confidence within your leadership. There's a larger question here, which is just because they can do it and they know how to do it, doesn't mean they necessarily do do it. Jen Psaki gets her MSNBC show and she just gives her opinion of the news.

Jen Psaki: Well, It's Monday everyone, the start of a new week. If you're looking at your own personal calendar, you might see some meetings, some appointments, maybe you're going to see some friends, maybe a grocery run if you have time. Let's just say the leading candidate for the Republican nominations calendar looks a little bit different.

Michael Socolow: That's very cheap and it'll draw ratings, but it's not reporting and it's not journalism.

Micah Loewinger: Clearly, there are some people who came from politics and had by and large, great careers in media. Where do you think the line should be?

Michael Socolow: I think the line should be established by professionalism. In other words, yes, you can come into journalism with a shadow over you from your political work, but if you demonstrate your independence, you'll be respected and get where you need to go. I'm thinking now somebody like Pete Williams, who was the Pentagon spokesman who translated into NBC News's military reporter, and did a wonderful job at that because he was clearly being a reporter. He was clearly breaking news, getting scoops, and acting independently for NBC News so quickly that people forgot he was a defense department spokesman. I think that's the standard.

Micah Loewinger: While ratings for all of these networks are going down, there seems to be a parallel trend in alternative media. I look at, for instance, Pod Save America.

Michael Socolow: Absolutely.

Micah Loewinger: One of the biggest left-wing podcasts and its company, Crooked Media, which is now host to many liberal progressive podcasts, it was created by former Obama aides. I look at Steve Bannon's War Room Podcast, one of the biggest right-wing podcasts.

Steve Bannon: This is the fight, all this nonsense, all this spin. They can't handle the truth.

Presenter: War room battleground.

Micah Loewinger: Here's a guy who's basically just bounced back and forth between political consulting running right bart, running campaigns, working in Trump's White House. Senator Ted Cruz and Matt Gaetz, they're still in office and they're already hosting their own podcasts. They're already pundits, so they have to be tapping into some kind of hunger out there.

Michael Socolow: The question that you're getting into now is the splintering and fracturing of the audience, in that we are empowered in a way we weren't to choose the news that confirms our bias already. We can choose a podcast like Joe Rogan or we can choose cable TV News channel like MSNBC or Fox News, and whoever actually appears there and gives us the information is secondary to the idea that we've already selected the information to come in through a filter that we want to see it.

The audience plays a major, major role in that sense, but even today, the number one most-watched broadcast journalist in the United States of America is somebody I almost never see anywhere. I'm not even sure if your show On The Media has ever profiled him.

Presenter: From ABC News, this is ABC World News Tonight with David Muir reporting tonight-

Michael Socolow: Why are about 9 million Americans a night tuning into David Muir on ABC News? His audience is three times larger than Fox News.

Micah Loewinger: You're saying people trust him because he's not a former political operative or because he is seen as a straight shooter.

Michael Socolow: I think he's seen as somebody who delivers information from the ABC News organization. It's not from the Democratic Party, it's not from the Republican Party. Whatever he's doing, it's enough to attract the largest broadcast journalism audience nightly in the United States of America.

Micah Loewinger: Ronna McDaniel is out because of a revolt within the newsrooms of MSNBC and NBC, et cetera. Is that how we start to correct this problem?

Michael Socolow: I think the Ronna McDaniel case is a tempest in a teapot. If you look at the NBC News President, Cesar Conde's memo, he says they're still going to go out and look for a Republican opinion maker who they can pay. It's not like the McDaniel case changes much. There's going to be this constant repetition and predictable cycles of outrage.

I think the animating impulse behind the hiring of McDaniel and behind the hiring of all these political commentators into journalism roles is that we audiences today the concept of journalism means tell me the information I already believe. The real issue we're discussing is the role of independent investigative journalism in a democracy. That's the real problem. It's not Ronna McDaniel.

Micah Loewinger: Michael, thank you very much.

Michael Socolow: Thank you.

Micah Loewinger: Michael Socolow is a professor of communication and journalism at the University of Maine.

[music]

Micah Loewinger: Coming up, Calvin Trillin recounts his games of tic-tac-toe with a Chinatown chicken.

Brooke Gladstone: This is On the Media.