Uprising Against

What the Uprising Against Ronna McDaniel Really Means

The staff revolt at NBC News underscores how the balance of power has shifted away from management.

By JACK SHAFER

Newsrooms have always been battlegrounds, with reporters staging sorties against editors and editors smiting reporters they considered to be out of line. But in nearly all of these skirmishes, there has never been much doubt about who held the real power. With the exception of formal labor disputes about pay and working conditions, newsroom bosses have held the upper hand. Reporters have had little recourse when angry other than to grumble or leak their dissatisfaction to other publications.

But over the past generation, huge packets of power have transferred from those bosses to their workers. This shift — made palpable this week by NBC News’ abrupt dismissal of former Republican National Committee Chair Ronna McDaniel after NBC News reporter Chuck Todd and the newsroom protested her hiring — has dramatically altered newsroom dynamics.

“In 35 years of covering the media, I have never seen a newsroom revolt like the one at NBC/MSNBC,” tweeted press critic David Zurawik. It was a little bit of an overstatement, but what is true today is that top editors, who once assigned and published pieces, hired and fired journalists, and set newsroom policy with minimal pushback from the staff, now face wild uprisings if they steer a course that riles enough newsroom employees. The bosses haven’t lost control, but they’re no longer completely in charge, and that is changing the way journalism gets done.

The roots of today’s prolific dissents can be traced back to the removal of New York Times Executive Editor Howell Raines and Managing Editor Gerald Boyd by management in 2003. Raines had had a rough 20 months in the slot. He had drawn scorn for overhyping the Augusta National Golf Club’s refusal to enlist female members as if it was a human rights travesty. His pet reporter, Rick Bragg, resigned shortly after the paper ran an editors’ note about his overreliance on a stringer’s work. And, significantly, the Jayson Blair scandal erupted on his watch. But none of these embarrassments justified Raines’ departure as the paper’s top editor. Rather, they catalyzed a newsroom mutiny in the making by a staff that had grown to despise Raines’ tyrannical ways. Unlike his predecessors, Max Frankel and Joseph Lelyveld, who had screw-ups of their own, Raines had no personal capital to trade when the newsroom mutinied against him. As Times veteran Jack Rosenthal told writer Seth Mnookin for his book Hard Times, a Times staff town hall “exploded with applause” when an employee asked Raines if he would be resigning.

Other more modest revolts flared here and there in the years that followed, but then a momentous shift took place, as social media and Slack became a real part of the newsroom mix starting in the next decade.

Prior to those technological innovations (or catastrophes), it was nigh on impossible for disgruntled newsrooms to broadcast their discontent. Their beefs were obviously not going to appear in their own pages. The only viable outlets for their gripes were city magazines and alternative weeklies (notably the Village Voice “Press Clips” column), and Spy magazine’s “J.J. Hunsecker,” who pilloried the Times. But as the 2010s rolled in, Facebook and Twitter afforded journalists and their comrades a new and efficient way to poke the bear.

And if the Raines implosion was more due to issues of personality, an ideological shift was also emerging (perhaps not coincidentally as Donald Trump also rose to power). A new generation of reporters began arriving, bringing with them a disdain for traditional journalistic norms, such as “objectivity,” and a willingness to clash with their superiors. (The news business is not alone here: See the recent anonymous petition assembled by White House staffers about Gaza and forwarded to the president.)

A few notable episodes in recent years:

• In 2017, a reader and staff uprising ensued at the New York Times over what protesters thought was a “normalizing” profile of a white nationalist and Nazi sympathizer in Ohio. The paper defended its coverage but also apologized meekly for having “offended so many readers.”
• In 2017, newly hired conservative columnist New York Times Bret Stephens was greeted by Twitter raspberries from readers and staffers alike. Stephens survives to this day.
• In 2018, the Atlantic hired and fired conservative literary ruffian Kevin D. Williamson after the staff and “the Twitter mob” ( Williamson’s words) took issue with his previous writings, including his 2014 tweet that women who have abortions should be hanged.
• In 2019, CNN reversed its decision to hire former Trump administration official Sarah Isgur as a political editor amid an avalanche of criticism; instead, she became a political analyst.
• In 2020, Washington Post journalist Wesley Lowery left the paper after he said his editors had “threatened” him for expressing his views on Twitter about the press’ failure to “properly cover and contextualize race.”
• In 2020, New York Times opinion editor James Bennet resigned following his publication of an op-ed by GOP Sen. Tom Cotton that urged the military be called in to quell George Floyd protests. Slack accounts at the Times and Twitter disparaged Bennet around the clock, with staffers claiming the op-ed put Times workers in danger. The newspaper’s union, the NewsGuild of New York, took the unusual move to protest the column.
• In 2021, members of the POLITICO newsroom protested the guest assignment of conservative writer Ben Shapiro to write its flagship “Playbook” newsletter, and made their feelings known in a newsroomwide Zoom session.
• In 2022, Washington Post reporter Felicia Sonmez was fired by the paper after a long-running battle with editors over her expressions on Twitter about Post policies, which she considered discriminatory.

There have been other dust-ups, but the McDaniel furor seems to be on its way to planting the flag of newsroom dissent as a permanent fixture at news outlets. Chuck Todd wasn’t the only high-profile NBC News employee to holler about McDaniel’s hiring. NBCers Rachel Maddow, Joe Scarborough and Joy Reid also criticized management on the air, as did the network’s union.

What the newsroom might think of a story or a news policy or a new hire has always mattered at the margins. However, without judging who is right and who is wrong in the above disputes, a trend has emerged that would paralyze journalists from earlier eras. Yes, editors still police the social media comments of their staffers, but they seem powerless to block these outpourings when great numbers in the newsroom take umbrage.

Robert G. Kaiser, who worked at the Washington Post for more than 50 years, including a long stint as the paper’s managing editor, expresses astonishment at the journalistic sea change we’re witnessing.

“If you had told [Carl] Bernstein and me in 1967 that we had no right to speak out about anything, we’d just say, OK, got it,” he told me. “The idea that you would defy Ben Bradlee to do something selfish in your own interest was inconceivable.” Bradlee was the paper’s charismatic top editor, and his word was law.

But Kaiser, who is 81, concedes that times have changed, and what seem right and natural in an earlier world might no longer apply.

“One of the lessons of a mentally healthy old age is that you kind of stop second-guessing your successors,” he says. “It’s just a different universe with different standards, different rules, different expectations. It’s hard for you and me to recognize profound changes when they’re happening.”

Writer Daniel Okrent, who served as the New York Times’ first public editor, finds it ironic that newsrooms originally urged staffers to use social media to build an audience for their publications. (Kaiser says he was urged to join Facebook by the paper’s owner, Don Graham, something he didn’t want to do.) Editors ultimately recoiled when some staffers started to voice their political opinions. But then they sent them back on social media, “because social media became an essential way to market a newspaper to market a brand,” Okrent says. “There are rules in place, clearly in many places, about what you can or cannot say. But it can’t really be policed.”

Okrent allows that he might be a “dinosaur,” stuck to the old ways of doing journalism, but he finds himself disturbed by the growing trend of editors giving in so easily to protesting staffs and chatter in the web.

“Just watching this collapse in this series of concessions that news management has been making over the past several years is really dispiriting. And I don’t want to watch it anymore,” he says. “The new way makes the case that even fairness, in our old definition, no longer matters. What matters, it seems to be, more and more, is, ‘Are you on the right side or on the wrong side?’ And that’s been defined in the newsrooms by, yes, web designers and the like, but also by a new generation who didn’t come from where we came from. Or at least where I came from.”

Asked how he’d run one of the fractious newsrooms today, Kaiser says he would have done what Post Executive Editor Marty Baron did when challenged by Lowrey and Somnez. “We don’t do this here because we respect each other,” he says he would have told them. “We have ways of dealing with our problems that don’t involve bringing the whole world.”

“But could I get away with that? I have no idea,” Kaiser says.

The web and its subsets of social media and Slack channels have probably relegated editorial dictatorships to the waste bin of history. Unless editors are willing to expend vast energies facing down “rebellious” staffers, as Baron did, we’re likely to see similar flare-ups at news outlets in the future. It’s no longer a simple matter of newsroom bosses cracking down on dissenting voices when they cross the red line of conduct that has been laid down in an outlet’s standards manual. If enough voices protest long enough and hard enough, the best that bosses can hope for is a stalemate.

The web, social media and Slack have given staffers the power to petition their grievances in a public forum that’s brand new. For the time being, power has shifted away from editors and toward newsroom employees. As the Ronna McDaniel episode enters the managerial crisis manual, not every newsroom boss will tread more softly, second-guess his own hiring practices and think twice about embracing controversy. Editors, after all, never march in lockstep. But the McDaniel story has awakened the newsroom to how much power there is for the taking.

As Kaiser says, it’s going to be a different universe.