What the Ronna McDaniel Scandal at MSNBC Tells us About Seattle Media

There was a surprisingly local lesson for Seattle in a recent national media scandal. 

For those who weren’t paying attention, former insurrection-booster and election-denier Ronna McDaniel was offered a job as a “commentator” by NBC. Until recently, McDaniel was the Chairman of the Republican National Committee. For some reason NBC thought that offering her perspective on TV would bring some kind of balance to their news coverage. McDaniel now admits that Biden won.

The blowback to hiring someone for a mainstream news network, despite the fact that she repeatedly tried to aid a coup and openly lied on the news, was intense. The rather idiotic job offer has since been rescinded.

Former Obama Communications Director and Senior Adviser Dan Pfeiffer, wrote a piece on why this is a great reminder that the corporate media is never going to be the savior of democracy. Democrats have to stop being dumb enough to believe that it is a bulwark protecting us from lies. In fact, he noted in a follow up piece, even though the media criticizes Trump, it shows an inadvertent bias in his favor by doing so much work to normalize him. 

By the way, Pfeiffer’s contributions on Pod Save America and his book, “Battling the Big Lie” are key for anyone thinking carefully about messaging and strategy for progressive politicians and causes.

The Seattle-Nicer Version

Dan’s analysis is applicable here in Seattle as well. We may not be fighting against a MAGA takeover, at least not of our governmental functions. But we do have insurrection-supporting MAGA donors buying candidates who will use fear of crime to get them favorable taxes while gutting social services. And we also have a city attorney who has worked with insurrectionists to try to recruit people to the Republican Party after January 6th. So we aren’t exactly immune!

In fact, this last Seattle election we had a lot of candidates that openly deceived the public, and an earnest, hardworking, professional media apparatus that totally failed to hold them accountable, for reasons that mirror the McDaniel scandal at NBC. 

As an example, The Seattle Times reports that mere days after their swearing in, two new councilmembers publicly said that a full audit of city finances was impossible. This was after, according to Crosscut, they “ran on promises to audit the budget before considering any taxes.” 

Recall that during the election, one of these two touted her background working on city budgets, and the other worked for an elite law firm. In other words, they already knew full well that audits are arduous and expensive. They were lying about their plans.

They knew they were lying. I knew they were lying. Reporters knew it was baloney, and some of them even told me! And yet they rarely, if ever, challenged them.

It was similar for police hiring. Almost every reporter that I spoke to on the record asked if I “supported the Mayor’s plan to staff The Seattle Police Department to 1400 cops.” They had access to all the information that showed this was functionally impossible.

Falling Short

Reporters could have pointed out the massive local, regional, and national police shortages that stem from a large, national exodus from policing since 2020. They could have reported that the problem is especially acute in big departments around the country, even departments that never had access to Kshama Sawant or encountered defunding pledges. They could have noted that there are conservative big cities with similar deficits. Sure, they could have acknowledged that we are farther off our hiring targets than others, but not totally out of range compared to some other big departments.

They could have acknowledged that years of strenuous efforts, marketing, and more recently, large bonuses, had failed to stem the tide of quits, and that our own department did not treat these “goals” as a form of reality when conducting its projections.

But they didn’t.

Sure, a few pressed candidates in the last couple weeks of the election with questions like “how are you going to get 1400 officers when it has been so hard?” But few exposed the fact that the answer, “I’m going to be more positive about police” and the goal of 1400 police at all, were not policy plans. 

Even Bruce Harrell hinted that he knew all of this all along, after the election of course. 

A media focused on truth telling would have pointed out that this “plan” was not rooted in any sort of reality. After all, most of us think their job is to report reality.

But the NBC scandal illustrates that this isn’t how they actually approach reporting. Instead, at least when it comes to anything involving logic or interpretation, they operate with a kind of middle-school, “there’s two sides to every story” worldview. And so their tendency is to imagine they have reported reality when they just report both sides. Just like letting Ronna McDaniel tell her dishonest side of the story. 

Unfortunately, when we are dealing with partisans who openly lie, this approach completely breaks down. While it has done so much more at a national level, and in autocratic and dangerous ways, the dishonesty part has found its way to the shores of the Puget Sound.

Most of our professional media not only failed to push back on the goal of hiring 1400 as impossible; they parroted it like it was some sort of reality-based plan, and demanded that we candidates say whether we were “for” or “against” it. 

So what are we supposed to do if the media won’t save us from people who want to take away freedom at the national level, or bamboozle us so they can pick poor people’s pockets at the local level?

Self Help

Save ourselves. 

Look, the mainstream media can aid us in some way. The Dan Pfeiffers of the world still rightly advise engaging with them. And these media folks are smart, hardworking professionals, doing their best in a flawed system. But we need to recognize the flaws of that system and adapt.

Like the British standing in formation while their enemies shot at them from behind trees, the old polite rules are not enough. The mainstream media’s incentives and naive ethical code do not actually do the best job of revealing reality, at least when we are dealing with newsmakers who operate in bad faith.

So we have to take messaging into our own hands.

As Pfeiffer argued in Battling the Big Lie, this means everything from building up a more robust, truth-telling media ecosystem that is committed to truth but isn’t committed to both-siderism, to direct voter contact and organizing. It means that while we need to engage with the mainstream media, and reject the false premises it swallows from the right, that no amount of clever messaging means it will tell our story. 

And it means that at no point do we get to think it’s someone else’s business to save us from those who would deceive us.

PS. To be clear, I’m talking about legitimate, mainstream, professional media here. I’m not talking about Sinclair owned propaganda outfits like KOMO, or brazenly partisan groups like those who control the Editorial Board at the Seattle Times. How we should think about them, and combat their more serious ethical lapses, is another topic for another day.