CNN’s Chris Wallace Roasts NBC Execs’ ‘Pretty Dumb’ Decision to Hire Ronna McDaniel

 

Chris Wallace took NBC News executives to task for their ill-fated decision to hire Ronna McDaniel as a paid contributor.

After fierce backlash, NBC parted ways with the former chair of the Republican National Committee after she lasted just half a scaramucci in the role.

Wallace appeared on CNN’s Laura Coates Live on Wednesday to offer his thoughts, but not before Laura Coates played a clip of him grilling McDaniel in July about the 2020 election. McDaniel told Wallace the contest had “lots of problems” as she echoed former President Donald Trump’s false claims of election fraud.

“What do you make of what happened here?” Coates asked Wallace of the drama at NBC.

“I think it was just a terrible mistake,” he replied. “I understand the idea that you want to find somebody to reflect Trump’s policies, Trumpism, if you will, because he’s one of the two candidates… running for the presidency.”

He then noted that the issue with hiring McDaniel wasn’t her political leanings, but rather her election denialism.

“But to hire somebody for supposedly $300,000 a year, who’s going to be – not only an election denier, which she was after the 2020 election – but somebody who worked and was calling people in Michigan trying to get them not to certify the vote. So, she was an election-denying enabler. To me, that’s a bridge too far.”

He concluded:

If you believe in something as fundamental as the peaceful transfer of power, and that we believe in elections and the winner wins and the loser concedes and goes home, to hire somebody to talk about Trumpism and supposedly give an insight into that, but someone who actually was an enabler of Trump’s effort to overturn the election, I can certainly understand why our colleagues at NBC found that unacceptable.

And frankly, I thought it was pretty dumb of the executives at NBC to think they were going to get away with it.

Watch above via CNN.

Tags:

Mike is a Mediaite senior editor who covers the news in primetime. Follow him on Bluesky.