NBC News Faces Rebellion Over Hiring of Former Republican Party Chair

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Leadership at NBC raced to contain an escalating revolt on Monday as some of the country’s best-known television anchors took the extraordinary step of criticizing their network on its own airwaves for hiring Ronna McDaniel, the former chairwoman of the Republican National Committee, as a political analyst. One day after Chuck Todd stunned executives by denouncing Ms. McDaniel’s appointment on “Meet the Press,” Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski opened their MSNBC show, “Morning Joe,” with a lengthy criticism of Ms. McDaniel, calling her “an anti-democracy election denier” and urging their bosses to reconsider her employment. “We’ve been inundated with calls this weekend, as have most people connected with this network, about NBC’s decision to hire her,” Mr. Scarborough said. “We weren’t asked our opinion of the hiring, but, if we were, we would have strongly objected to it for several reasons.” Hours later, the star MSNBC host Nicolle Wallace all but accused her employer of enabling authoritarianism by granting Ms. McDaniel a platform. She told her viewers that NBC News, “wittingly or unwittingly,” had signaled to “election deniers” that they could spread falsehoods “as one of us, as badge-carrying employees of NBC News, as paid contributors to our sacred airwaves.”