This Aug. 21, 2009, file photo shows the NBC logo at its headquarters in New York. (AP Photo/Bebeto Matthews, File)

NBC News has decided to partner with Rumble and the Salem Radio Network for the next GOP debate in Miami on Nov. 8. It is a shocking decision that tarnishes the NBC brand and abandons the company’s published values. So far, NBC has refused to answer questions about why they agreed to this deal.

The partnership will be on full display during the debate because two of NBC’s marquee news anchors, Lester Holt and Kristen Welker, will sit alongside Salem’s Hugh Hewitt. The entire thing will be streamed on the video sharing platform Rumble.

NBC’s credibility took a hit when Welker launched her tenure at “Meet the Press” with a flawed interview with Donald Trump. Now we must ask whether that was just a one-off or the beginning of a spreading wound.

CNN media critic Oliver Darcy says, “…It is striking that NBC News would agree to link arms with such organizations.”  He’s not wrong. In a difficult time for journalism, the oldest broadcast network in the country owes the public an explanation.

NBC and its parent company, Comcast, has its corporate values and standards published on its website. Those values include:

  • “Doing the right thing and acting with integrity. It’s as simple as doing what’s right and treating people the right way.”
  • “Respect for each other. We are committed to a culture of fairness, respect, and inclusion: within our leadership and our workforce, with our customers and suppliers, in our programming, and in the communities we serve.”

NBC News’ own website has a section dedicated to journalism education. One of the articles is “A Quick and Easy Guide to Spotting Disinformation.” There’s also a code of conduct for the NBC News message boards that prohibits posting anything that includes “hatred, bigotry, racism, or gratuitous violence. misrepresents the source of anything you post…” These ethical standards and the partnership with Rumble and Salem cannot be squared.

Banned on mainstream platforms, thriving on Rumble

If you have the stomach to scroll through Rumble, you’ll find a rogue’s gallery of some of the vilest people in our country today, spreading hate, lies and disinformation. Here are a few:

  • Alex Jones was ordered to pay over $1-billion to Sandy Hook parents for spreading lies about the massacre of their children and families. Glorifying violence got him banned from YouTube, but he’s a Rumble favorite.
  • Charlie Kirk daily rages are filled with racist, bigoted remarks 24/7, and his Turning Point USA group promotes white nationalist ties. Lately, Charlie is busy spewing Islamophobia, including fabricated tales about Hamas terrorists coming into the United States.
  • Donald Trump Jr. gets paid millions to rant on the video sharing site.
  • Dennis Prager and his fake university make propaganda videos that are now being used in K-12 schools in red states
  • Stew Peters traffics in antisemitic rhetoric, has antisemitic guests and produced the wildly inaccurate “Died Suddenly” documentary about the debunked premise that COVID vaccines were deadly.
  • Dan Bongino is a major funder of Rumble and someone The New York Times describes as a misinformation superspreader.
  • Dinesh D’Sousa produced the wildly inaccurate and greatly discredited video “2000 mules” movie about the 2020 election.
  • Andrew Tate is an accused rapist, accused human trafficker who even streamed on Rumble while under house arrest thanks to a multi-million-dollar content creator

These and others on this alt-right streaming platform are election deniers, climate change hoaxers, anti-vaxxers, QAnon supporters and more. The media credibility watchdog NewsGuard deems Rumble “hoax central.” Some of the Rumble content is so vile that many of the contributors on this YouTube wannabe site have been banned from other media platforms.

Tuning into disinformation on Salem Radio

Like Rumble, the Salem Radio Network traffics in right-wing propaganda, Christian nationalism, lies, conspiracies and bigotry. Shows hosted by folks like Kirk, Prager, Sebastian Gorka, and Eric Metaxas regularly spout this dangerous vitriol. Salem has 117 radio stations, websites, podcasts and more. It financed “2000 Mules” and actively works to elect Republicans, especially Donald Trump.

According to Media Matters, “The conservative Christian network pressured its hosts to cover Trump positively and purged those who did not.” Political historian Nicole Hemmer of Vanderbilt University told The New York Times this about Salem: “They are using their many different properties for coordinated messaging to promote misinformation, which is undermining democracy.”

Most recently, 9/11-style Islamophobia has been gushing from the Salem airwaves. Some examples collected by Media Matters:

Hugh Hewitt is one of Salem’s lead broadcasters. He has a weekly show during the coveted morning drive slot. Once upon a time, Hewitt was a respected conservative who worked for Ronald Reagan. He worked for MSNBC as a weekend morning host for a year and remains a contributor to the opinion section of the Washington Post. Now, he has gone full MAGA. In 2019, the Daily Beast asked, “What the Hell Happened to Hugh Hewitt?” The article included this:

“Since President Donald Trump took office, it seems, Hewitt has undergone a dramatic political shift mirroring the path of the Republican Party — one that has become increasingly about fealty to the president, above all other values — leaving some of the radio host’s friends dumbfounded.

“He’s lost his fucking mind,” said one senior colleague at MSNBC, where Hewitt was once a host and is currently an on-air contributor. “He’s put himself in the same position as Lou Dobbs.”

Media Matters wrote, “Hugh Hewitt is Sean Hannity in glasses.” And like Hannity, Hewitt is an ardent Trump supporter. Take a look at this column he wrote for the Washington Examiner leading up to the 2016 election to get an idea of Hewitt’s views and how badly he misjudged Trump.

“And, a key and non-negotiable thing, Trump isn’t a racist. He is simply monumentally indifferent to the language of race, and having interviewed him a dozen plus times and helped conduct four debates among the GOP candidates including him, I’m confident of this judgment.

He has many flaws and some strengths, but he isn’t a racist, or a dangerous demagogue, a Mussolini-in-waiting, a Caesar off-stage. He isn’t going to roll Paul Ryan, Mitch McConnell or, most formidable of all, the Constitution.”

Then there’s his morally indefensible and craven capitulation to MAGA ideology: Hewitt won’t address the Jan. 6 attack on our Capitol because:

“I never talk about Jan. 6 because I like my audience, I don’t want them to turn me off. And they’re bored, they do not like it, it is illegitimate …” 

What is NBC News thinking?

As I write this, videos of the second GOP debate are still easy to find on the Rumble site. They are on a curated list together with debate reaction videos by notable extremists like Kirk, Bongino, Steve Bannon, Steven Crowder and Dave Rubin.  Next week, NBC News will be in that toxic mix, too.

What were they thinking? They won’t tell us. Meanwhile, we have to wonder whether the inauspicious relaunch of “Meet the Press” was actually the launch of a new direction for NBC News. As a former journalist, it is heartbreaking to see the peacock network in this media dumpster.

Jennifer Schulze is a former Chicago journalist who talks media every month on WCPT 820AM on “Live, Local & Progressive with Joan Esposito” with former Chicago Tribune editor Mark Jacob. You can follow her on Twitter/X @NewsJennifer or Threads @jenniferschulzechi.