Ronna McDaniel's Flameout and the Death of Gatekeeping

on Mar 30, 2024

No wonder we're all so anxious and depressed now. We have reams of information, more than we could ever possibly use, and no one to put it into context for us. We need to be experts on every front, sifting through the silt, looking for nuggets of gold. The only problem is, we have no idea how to tell the difference between fool's gold and the real thing. It all looks valuable. There's no one to tell us, "Don't worry about that one. It's junk."

There have been, to be sure, benefits to the extinction of gatekeepers. We're less likely to be led astray by someone else, a poor gatekeeper who's too ignorant or too corrupt to do the job properly. But we're doing a fine job of leading ourselves astray almost as often, and our hunger for gatekeepers can lead us to place too much trust in the public figures we feel represent us. We're desperate for help deciding where to spend our mental, emotional and spiritual energy. There's no other explanation for the power of so-called influencers.

Now, Ronna McDaniel? She's no Walter Cronkite.

But when I went looking for all the terrible things she must have said to be forced out of NBC, I found something odd, which is to say, not much.

She didn't say that Trump won the 2020 election. In fact, she said the opposite.

Sure, she's done the same talking-out-of-both-sides-of-her-mouth thing that virtually every conservative politician with a sense of self-preservation has been engaging in for the last four years. But there's value to viewers to be informed about what conservatives are saying and thinking. I mean, I guess there's a risk MSNBC viewers might accidentally agree with her, but otherwise the downside was pretty low.

At least, that's what the would-be gatekeepers at NBC thought.

But, as McDaniel learned, the gate's already open and the floodwaters are rushing out, too fast to contain. Closing the gate is impossible. The position of gatekeeper, like so many others, has been eliminated.

To learn more about Georgia Garvey, visit GeorgiaGarvey.com.

----