Robby Soave wrote this Tuesday:

NBC News has hired recently departed Republican National Committee (RNC) Chair Ronna McDaniel as an on-air contributor, and many of her new colleagues are fleeing for their safe spaces.

Chuck Todd, the former host of NBC’s Meet the Press, appeared on his old show with host Kristen Welker over the weekend and savaged the network for hiring McDaniel after all of the “gaslighting” that occurred at the RNC during her reign. He went on to suggest that the network had put Welker—who had just interviewed McDaniel—in a horrible position.

Todd was not alone: Morning Joe co-hosts Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski were similarly outraged.

That’s quite a lot of hand-wringing over a cable channel hiring a former politico to provide opinion commentary—a turn of events that is not remotely unprecedented.

Indeed, Todd’s suggestion that his bosses might have transgressed journalistic norms by hiring and interviewing a political operative with potentially mixed loyalties is pretty rich considering, well, the existence of Jen Psaki. Psaki, of course, is the anchor of her own show on MSNBC, despite formerly serving as White House press secretary for President Joe Biden. There was not some massive time gap between these two positions—on the contrary, she negotiated her move to cable while still working within the administration.

Psaki was a paid CNN contributor before working for Biden, and prior to that, she was part of the Obama administration. It’s almost as if there’s a revolving door between working in politics and being paid by the media to talk about politics, and liberal journalists did not particularly find this controversial until about 5 seconds ago. Indeed, Scarborough is himself a former Republican member of Congress. Nicolle Wallace, a former communications director for President George W. Bush, also has an MSNBC show. (The network has a type, and that type is ex-Republican-turned-anti-Trump zealot.)

Then there’s Symone Sanders, who jumped from the 2016 Bernie Sanders campaign to CNN and then joined the Biden campaign in 2020, became a spokesperson for Vice President Kamala Harris, and finally ended up with her own show at…MSNBC. To be clear, this practice of hiring former Washington insiders to provide commentary is standard practice within cable news; it is not remotely confined to MSNBC. Donna Brazile, who has previously served as acting chair of the Democratic National Committee, has been a paid contributor on CNN, ABC, and Fox News. Fox also employs Dana Perino, a former Bush White House spokesperson. And of course, ABC News famously hired George Stephanopoulos, a former communications director in the Bill Clinton White House, to serve as a correspondent and political analyst even though he had no previous journalism experience whatsoever.

The selective outrage over McDaniel is thus pretty rich.

What’s really going on here is that mainstream media figures dislike McDaniel because of the work she did on Donald Trump’s behalf. But unlike the network’s cadre of Trump-hating Republican commentators, McDaniel is actually in a position to educate viewers about Trump’s appeal to a significant share of the electorate. If they don’t like what she’s saying, other on-air personalities can challenge her. That is the whole point of cable news commentary, right?

Stephen L. Miller added:

Former Republican National Committee chairwoman Ronna Romney McDaniel was invited to the cafeteria, where she was promptly told by the cool kids that she can’t sit with them.

The news cycle sits on day five of what has been a week- and weekend-long struggle session over NBC’s hiring of McDaniel to provide election-year analysis. Which leads us to wonder: are there any adults still working at NBC and MSNBC?

McDaniel’s hiring simply could not stand with the elite of MSNBC like Chuck Todd, Joe Scarborough and Nicolle Wallace (all former political operatives) as they issued on-air apologies over NBC management to hire someone so closely attuned to a political party they don’t belong to.

Jen Psaki would like a word. While she was sitting White House press secretary, she signed a lucrative on-air contributor deal with MSNBC, NBC News and NBC’s Peacock streaming service. It was unprecedented — a sitting White House press secretary taking questions from her contractual colleagues was a clear violation of ethical conduct between a supposedly independent press and the White House they are meant to be covering.

There was no hand-wringing. There was no public uproar. There were no on-air apologies or brow beatings. Jen Psaki was welcomed at NBC with open arms — and zero hint of hypocrisy.

Likewise, MSNBC played a major part in rehabbing the reputation of controversial race-baiter Al Sharpton, even rewarding him with own show to host. Once again, not a peep.

By Monday, the zone had been flooded with commentary from others at the cool kids’ media table. Self-appointed media finger-wagger Margaret Sullivan caterwauled over at the Guardian, writing, “Can NBC News recover from its damaging decision to hire Ronna McDaniel?” She went on to say that. “Hiring McDaniel — a powerful election denialist who joined then president Donald Trump in pressuring voting officials not to certify the 2020 election — was like putting a standing chyron on the NBC Nightly News: ‘Lying is rewarded here.’”

If election denial is the new on-air standard at NBC, then a lot of people should be fearing for their jobs, including Rachel Maddow, Chris Hayes, Joy Reid and others. And if hiring political operatives is now a beyond the pale for networks, then I have a long list of those who should be immediately dismissed, including Chuck Todd himself (as a campaign aide to Democratic senator Tom Harkin), Nicolle Wallace (former Bush administration communications director), Jake Tapper (campaign press secretary for Democratic congressional candidate Marjorie Margolies-Mezvinsky), ABC News chief political director George Stephanopoulos (President Bill Clinton),and obviously Jen Psaki.

No one’s hands are clean in any of this — and they all know it. This mainstream media morale-boosting performances are simply meant to obfuscate that fact. This is simply about who is allowed to sit at the table, and who is not. Remember the blow-up over Republican senator Tom Cotton being allowed to publish an op-ed in the New York Times?

None of this makes Ronna McDaniel the victim, though; she has bankrupted the RNC and oversaw massive election losses during her tenure. Then, during a consequential election year, she resigned from the RNC for a cushy media job, just like former RNC chair Michael Steele. And until establishment members of the Republican Party care more about their own voters than they do allying with a media that has sunk their own fangs into her, the party will deserve the sellout label it has rightfully earned.

But that was so Monday ago. The Hill now reports:

NBC is facing heavy criticism from the right for terminating a deal to add former Republican National Committee Chair Ronna McDaniel as a contributor.

McDaniel’s abrupt exit followed vocal protests from some of the network’s most prominent on-air hosts, who took issue with her past rhetoric on the 2020 election and the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol.

Former President Trump, who has had his own up-and-down relationship with McDaniel, was among the Republicans criticizing NBC.

“Wow! Ronna McDaniel got fired by Fake News NBC. She only lasted two days, and this after McDaniel went out of her way to say what they wanted to hear,” Trump wrote on his Truth Social website Tuesday.

“The sick degenerates over at MSDNC are really running NBC, and there seems nothing Chairman Brian Roberts can do about it,” the former president wrote in another post attacking Comcast, the network’s parent company.

Conservative pundit Hugh Hewitt, who moderated a GOP primary debate hosted by NBC News last fall, said he had “never seen anything this brutal since I got started in media in 1990.”

“I think they made a terrible decision, and they allowed the MSNBC bleed to take over their network,” he said, referring to the sister cable channel of NBC, which leans left.

“It’s going to hurt. The 74 million people who voted for Donald Trump are not going to watch NBC News,” he said.

Kayleigh McEnany, a Fox host who worked for McDaniel for two years before serving as Trump’s White House press secretary, blasted MSNBC hosts for “taking a victory lap for silencing a conservative.”

“They do have some Republicans at NBC,” McEnany noted in reference to pundits such as former RNC Chair Michael Steele and Marc Short, former chief of staff to Vice President Mike Pence. “But Ronna came as close as you could to any voice on the network that supported the current nominee of the party who represents half the country.”

In a note to staff announcing the decision to terminate its agreement with McDaniel, NBCUniversal News Group Chair Cesar Conde wrote her hiring was initially “made because of our deep commitment to presenting our audiences with a widely diverse set of viewpoints and experiences, particularly during these consequential times.”

Conservative critics see NBC’s reversal as a direct contradiction of that pledge, and a stifling of viewpoints sympathetic to Trump and that of his supporters more generally.

“No one’s allowed to represent the voice [of Trump] on NBC,” exclaimed the popular Fox News host Jesse Watters hours after news first broke about McDaniel’s possible ouster. “And now we’re hearing the inmates are running the asylum. That just tells me NBC is not a business, it’s a political operation.”

On cable news channel NewsNation, pundit Geraldo Rivera called the outcry from MSNBC talent that ultimately led to McDaniel’s ouster a “tsunami of pretentious bullshit.”

Rachel Maddow, one of the longest-serving and most prominent hosts on MSNBC who a night earlier had called for the former RNC head’s firing, said her opposition to McDaniel joining the Peacock family was not about politics.

“It’s not even about hiring somebody who has Trump ties. This was a very specific case because of Miss McDaniel’s involvement in the election interference stuff,” Maddow said late Tuesday after McDaniel had been ousted. “And I’m grateful our leadership was able to do the bold, strong, resilient thing.”

While much of the criticism of the McDaniel hire came from progressive pundits on MSNBC, the decision to oust her may have negative consequences for journalists working behind the scenes at NBC.

The online media outlet Semafor reported late Tuesday that several reporters at NBC were fielding complaints about the McDaniel saga from Republican sources, some saying the decision confirmed what they see as the network’s bias against conservatives.

“Those are the ones who I feel the worst for, because they’re getting screwed over by their left-wing activist bosses,” one national Republican strategist told The Hill on Wednesday. “They know as much as anyone this makes the entire company look in the tank for Democrats.”

NBC did not return a request for comment, but Conde, in his note to staff, reiterated the company will continue to work to broaden the range of viewpoints it is putting on the air.

“We continue to be committed to the principle that we must have diverse viewpoints on our programs, and to that end, we will redouble our efforts to seek voices that represent different parts of the political spectrum,” he said.

That makes Ben Domenech observe …