The Leadership Vacuum That Led to the Ronna McDaniel Fail at NBC

Conde’s professional experience has largely been focused on the board room, rather than the newsroom. (He sits on the boards of directors of both Walmart and PepsiCo, as well as on the Council on Foreign Relations.) A veteran of the company since 2013, Conde had overseen NBCUniversal’s international businesses and later its Spanish-language division Telemundo Enterprises before adding oversight of the NBC News Group in 2020. Cavanagh gave him a promotion last year, adding NBC’s local TV stations to his purview.

After Noah Oppenheim departed as president of the news division last year, Conde did not fill that position. Instead he elevated a handful of top executives, none of whom has broad oversight across the division. That organizational structure has been critiqued by some internally as being somewhat byzantine, with the different NBC News shows having their own “fiefdoms.” (Not that everything was smooth sailing in the Oppenheim era. Remember that the news division sat on the infamous Access Hollywood tape, and the allegations that Oppenheim helped kill Ronan Farrow’s Harvey Weinstein exposé.)