Ronna McDaniel is out. But why are TV networks paying partisan pundits at all?

Thanks to a newsroom revolt, Republican National Committee chair Ronna McDaniel's tenure at NBC News didn't even last a full Scaramucci.

Critics have seized on the debacle to argue that the network doesn't know how to handle conservatives in the age of Donald Trump.

Open the aperture a bit more, and another question comes into focus: Why should American TV news networks pay leading politicians at all?

NBC's journalists and anchors objected not because she was a conservative, or even a Trump ally, but because she had played an active role in trying to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential race and had repeatedly and publicly trashed the press.

Still, McDaniel was - at least for a hot minute - just the latest among a string of political figures from both major political parties hired by television networks to join their news shows as commentators offering expertise.

As NBCUniversal News chief Cesar Conde put it in a memo Wednesday evening, the network is seeking "a widely diverse set of viewpoints and experience, particularly during these consequential times."

ABC, CBS, CNN...they all have paid pundits on air

In hiring McDaniel, NBC's Conde and his leadership team figured they were traveling a well-worn path with the reported $300,000 contract for McDaniel.

After all, ABC recently hired former RNC chair and Trump Chief of Staff Reince Priebus. CBS had hired former Trump White House Chief of Staff Mick Mulvaney. He is now on board at the fledgling network NewsNation.

And for years, CNN kept Donna Brazile on the payroll - even though she was the deputy chair of the Democratic National Committee at the time.

Her case throws the tensions into stark relief. Brazile resigned from CNN in fall 2016 after it was