Tonight, just as in Savannah Guthrie’s petulant display moderating a town hall with Donald Trump last week, her NBC News colleague Kristen Welker will try to convince you that her team is very, very opposed to the president. Welker will try to sell her employers as very woke and the Orange Man Bad.
Do not believe it. NBC and (now CNN boss) Jeff Zucker don’t only own Trump’s fin de siecle revival into a Hollywood superstar, but also the industrywide tolerance for the boorishness that allowed Trump to become president.
Everyone knows the story of Zucker, the president of NBC Entertainment, plucking the then-broke brander from the obscurity of tabloid fatigue and boredom to reinvent Trump into a genius business and macho celebrity. But it’s worth considering how much NBC already laid the groundwork for Trump to get away with, well, being Trump. Its roots go back to the 1990s.
Thanks to the feminist solidarity of “one free grope” that protected Bill Clinton, it’s unlikely that the Senate would have voted to convict him of his impeachment charges over an affair with the subordinate Monica Lewinsky or even lying about it. But a flat-out rape? That was a different story and one that NBC actively sat on until the Democrat was acquitted. And the people who chose to hide a thoroughly vetted interview of Juanita Broaddrick, who damningly alleged Clinton raped her while he served as Arkansas attorney general: former NBC Chairman Andy Lack and NBC producer David Corvo. (Zucker was reportedly also involved.)
A few years later, Trump was feted by every establishment media apparatus, including Vogue magazine, but it was NBC that transformed him into a hero. Somewhere around this time, Trump went on NBC’s Access Hollywood. There, he confessed to what can be defined as criminal sexual battery at best. Everyone on set laughed with him, and NBC sat on the tape for more than a decade. Flash-forward to 2016, and it wasn’t NBC that published it, but the Washington Post.
There’s no reason to expect that NBC gave a damn about sexual assault or harassment until Trump decided to endorse tax cuts and call the media the “enemy of the people.” Recall, this is the network that silenced Ronan Farrow’s blockbuster reporting into Harvey Weinstein’s serial rapes because the disgraced mogul allegedly threatened to expose Matt Lauer, NBC’s own resident alleged rapist.
In short, NBC was complicit in the creating Trump and the factors to let Trumpism flourish. Just consider, by 2015, Trump had called for the death penalty of the Central Park Five, was already outed as a bad and womanizing businessman, embraced the race-tinged birther conspiracy theory, and launched his presidential campaign by deeming Mexican immigrants “rapists” and “murderers.” That is why an entire cottage industry of conservatives began to panic, an emotion only outmatched by our bewilderment of why the media, NBC included, would air empty podiums of the guy who went on Howard Stern to brag about barging into Miss Universe dressing rooms and calling his avoidance of STDs his own “personal Vietnam,” while brilliant senators and governors struggled to get media coverage.
We all knew exactly who Trump was while Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski let Trump skip out on Fox debates and promised not to give him questions that were “too hard.” We all knew exactly who Trump was when Lorne Michaels gave him a plum hosting gig on Saturday Night Live. We all knew who Trump was for decades, and now that he’s a pro-life, tax-cutting, China hawk with a bully pulpit, NBC has to pretend it wasn’t all in.
Exit note: Welker’s families are ardent Democratic donors, and she was caught tipping off Hillary Clinton’s team in 2016 of a question she would ask. At the very least, unlike Guthrie, she isn’t Lauer’s (former) BFF.
