After days of on-air reporter revolts, NBC News has unhired former Republican National Committee Chair Ronna McDaniel. Some will position the outrage over McDaniel’s hiring as being overly partisan or driven by a fear of hearing opposing views on opinion shows. That view is wrong. Michael Steele, also a former RNC Chair, is a current NBC News employee. The issue with Ronna McDaniel isn’t just that she has spent the last several years attacking the press (even though that alone would be a good reason for the press not to hire her). The issue is that Ronna McDaniel was an active part of an ongoing effort to deny and overturn the results of an American election. She betrayed America. And until she was dropped from the RNC in favor of Trump’s daughter-in-law, she was an active participant in telling the lies required to get Trump back into the White House – enabling and empowering a candidate who has made the Jan. 6 attack a cornerstone of his bid for the White House. When your reaction to a question about a legitimate Biden election is to say, I don’t think he won it fair, I don’t. I’m not going to say that, then you don’t get to work for a legitimate news organization. NBC News should not be in the Big Lie advancement business. We cannot normalize lies. Why am I leading with a inside-baseball story about a bad hire at a news organization? Because it’s part of the bigger story of what Americans are willing or unwilling to tolerate and normalize as we face an existential threat to our democracy. With democracy on the line, we need the American press to be better than ever. Journalists working for a major brand were called upon to take a stand when an absolutely critical line was crossed, and with near uniformity, they did. It’s taken while, but maybe the good guys finally know what’s at stake.

+ Historian Timothy Snyder: “So this is like a trial run for NBC and everyone else to say okay, we’re going to practice appeasing a dictator and then when it comes, we’ll be better at it.” Yeah, we’re talkin ’bout practice.

+ After following news links for a couple decades, I have a spidey-sense for news momentum and how stories might play out. Right after McDaniel’s hire, I predicted she’d be gone by Monday. I was off by about eleven hours. I guess I forgot what time Maddow was on. (Here’s an idea: Maybe news orgs should stop hiring pundits altogether and hire reporters instead.)