The Day the Lunatics Took Over the Asylum

A tale of media sanctimony and hypocrisy.

There’s been a lot of chatter over the hiring and firing of former Republican National Committee chairwoman Ronna McDaniel by NBC News. By now you know the basic story, so let’s take a few minutes to talk about the kind of inconvenient truths that NBC doesn’t want to talk about.

First, MSNBC — and all cable outfits — hire contributors to be biased. Fox doesn’t hire conservative partisans to say that every now and then liberals make a good point — and CNN and MSNBC don’t hire liberals and progressives to say nice things about conservatives.

Which means NBC was taking a chance hiring a conservative woman to work on a liberal network. The progressives on MSNBC, as we know, didn’t approve. So they revolted, right there on the air, to make sure everyone would know that they did not accept their boss’s decision to hire such a “threat to democracy.”

Joe Scarborough weighed in with his disapproval and his co-host Mika Brzezinski claimed that their objection to the hiring of McDaniel wasn’t because she was a conservative Republican — but because she was an “anti-democracy election denier.”

Rachel Maddow said that it wasn’t about whether Ms. McDaniel was a Republican or Democrat, “it’s about our system of government and undermining elections and going after democracy.”

Other MSNBC hosts joined the chorus.

And soon thereafter, the profile in weakness who runs news at NBC caved and fired McDaniel — without even telling her. She learned she had been sacked from reports in the media. How’s that for class?