“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 NBC Universal 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.
AUDIENCE DEVELOPMENT A quick look at NBCU News’s 2023 viewership
