MEDIA

Inside Cesar's Palace NBCUniversal News chairman Cesar Conde's empire was rocked by a recent revolt.

- BRIAN STELTER

"AS A NEWS ORGANIZATION," SAID CESAR Conde, who oversees NBC News, "the biggest currency that we have is trust." Trust is earned over time, of course, and a visitor traversing the halls of 30 Rockefeller Plaza can viscerally feel its accrual. The Midtown Manhattan building is where, in 1941, NBC launched as the first commercial television network in the United States; and in 2024, trusted anchors relay the evening news to some 6.7 million viewers every night.

But trust can also be lost in an instant. That's a truism that Conde, who has been chairman of the NBCUniversal News Group since 2020, is now grappling with. His organization's many victories in recent years are being overshadowed by a recent scandal: the hiring and firing, in March, of the former Republican National Committee boss Ronna McDaniel from being a contributor. It was a move that prompted an on-air revolt by staff (who pointed out that McDaniel had pushed Donald Trump's debunked claims of voting malfeasance in the 2020 election) and a backlash from people on the right (who chalked up her dismissal as proof of left-wing media bias).

Before the McDaniel episode spiraled into the biggest controversy of Conde's chairmanship, I had a series of conversations with him, his first in-depth interviews since assuming the role. He leads a growing portfolio of news outlets, including the national network; NBC's local stations; MSNBC and CNBC on cable; and the fast-growing free streaming network, NBC News Now all of which must appeal to viewers across a splintering media landscape.

NBC News Now, which launched in 2019 and is available on NBC's website as well as more than a dozen streaming platforms, has seen four consecutive years of growth and in 2023 saw an average monthly viewership of 45 million hours. It's all scaled up for the 2024 presidential election.

But this particular election seems like a toxin that harms everything it touches, including NBC.