Letters to the Editor: NBC’s firing of Ronna McDaniel was no surprise. But it was a disaster

To the editor: I grew up in the hinterlands watching Walter Cronkite on CBS Channel 7 broadcasting out of Dayton, Ohio. Objectivity was Cronkite’s brand.

In 2016, I sat in my office at USC and watched a CBS correspondent smarmily deprecate the Republican Party’s nominee for president, Donald Trump, and I suddenly realized how far network news had fallen.

The mass conniptions former Republican National Committee Chair Ronna McDaniel’s hiring induced among NBCUniversal News Group’s on-air talent makes it clear that the legacy media are still in free-fall. They have earned their irrelevance.

Jim Moore, Los Angeles

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To the editor: Could there be a more blatant example of how wide the distance is between senior management’s devotion to increasing advertising revenue and journalistic integrity at NBC?

The idea, much less the approval, of hiring an individual with a record so removed from facts or truthfulness is remarkable on its own. Sean Spicer must have already been taken.

But the claim that there “couldn’t be a more important moment” for having to listen to a fully documented liar and willing participant in the Michigan false elector scandal makes this whole episode even more troubling.

Thankfully, the network’s trusted journalists stood up to those who are not.

Ted Rosenblatt, Pacific Palisades

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To the editor: The L.A. Times has been more diligent than NBC in assuring that the paper remains left-wing biased.

I am a lifelong Republican and a supporter of Donald Trump. I am not a supporter of Ronna McDaniel and actually think that she is largely responsible for Republican underperformance in recent national elections.

I would put her in the RINO category, and I think that fact entered into NBC’s decision to hire her. Still, I think NBC’s owner should rehire her.

Larry Hart, Tarzana