Welcome back to In the Room. I’m Dylan Byers.

Greetings from 30,000 feet. I’m en route to Seattle and the San Juan Islands. Barring major breaking news, I’ll be off all next week, and with limited cell service. Please forward your Condé Nast tips to Lauren, and your ESPN intel to Ourand. I’ll be back in your inboxes no later than April 10.

In tonight’s email, more post-Ronnaghazi hunger screams from 30 Rock and 400 North Cap. While NBC News and MSNBC executives are pointing fingers at one another and trying to evade blame, network veterans are asking a more salient question: Where was Cesar Conde?

In a meeting with the White House team, Blumenstein took the heat for almost 90 minutes. She acknowledged that the decision to hire McDaniel, which she and senior vice president of politics Carrie Budoff Brown had spearheaded, had been a mistake. She also stressed that it had been done with the best of intentions—though she was not able to quite articulate precisely why she and the rest of the leadership team had thought it was a good idea to hire a full-blown election denier at a time when trust in the media is at a nadir.

Meanwhile, Budoff Brown was O.O.O., ostensibly in New York for sales meetings, and so Blumenstein was also forced to field a question about the revelation, reported here earlier this week, that her direct report had worked with McDaniel’s former R.N.C. aide to try to quell the network’s protest and even thanked him for instigating a social media campaign against her colleague Chuck Todd—a boneheaded intra-office oppo campaign that we have certainly not heard the last about. (Back at 30 Rock the following day, Blumenstein would do it all over again, remotely, with the staff of Meet the Press.)

In any event, in the 72 hours since McDaniel’s termination, the halls and Slack channels of both NBC News and MSNBC have, rather predictably, filled with rumor and speculation about who bears responsibility for the mess, who should bear responsibility, and whether or not anyone will be thrown, justly or unjustly, under the proverbial bus—or, as we say around here, get defenestrated. On the NBC News side, both Blumenstein and Budoff Brown appear to suffer from a notable dearth of goodwill, as well as a lingering suspicion that their lack of TV news experience may be to blame for the misguided recruitment. (Blumenstein came from the Times, Budoff Brown from Politico.) At MSNBC, most people seem to view Jones’ shifty absolution two-step for what it is, but they may not totally care. Jones has always left the MSNBC talent alone, letting the anchors run their shows—and, now that McDaniel’s out, they’re content to continue with that arrangement.

At a higher level, however, the Ronnaghazi scandal has emphasized and exacerbated deeper, latent anxieties at both networks about their big boss, NBC News Group chairman Cesar Conde, as well as the convoluted structure of siloed fiefdoms that made the McDaniel hire possible and, indeed, explains all of the ongoing finger-pointing. In conversations with at least 30 NBC News Group executives, anchors, producers, correspondents, and other journalists this week, a recurring theme emerged, suggesting that Conde’s own ambitions as a corporate climber caused him to ignore or overlook his obligations to the news networks that he ostensibly leads. And the Ronna Romney McDaniel headache is merely the most recent and visible example.

Is it fair to blame the chairman for an unintentional fuck-up made well below his pay grade that led to a Chernobyl-level disaster, all of it broadcast on NBC and MSNBC’s air? Yes and no, but the point here is that the McDaniel affair, which was both stupid and avoidable, crystallized for so many a generally held belief that their boss appears less focused on the product that his teams create, and more on his own image and ascent. “Cesar is a corporate guy with corporate and political goals for himself—not in a bad way; that’s just who he is,” one MSNBC talent told me. “The reason this happened is because he’s not paying attention to us.”

Instead, Conde focuses on the finances. He spends a lot of time at home in Miami, where he built his career as the head of Univision and then Telemundo, and is a fixture in society circles. He hobnobs with fellow residents of 15 Central Park West, the preferred home of hedge fund managers and Goldman execs; serves on the boards of Pepsi and Walmart; and maintains a presence on the elite Davos and Alfalfa Club circuit, pursuing meetings with more powerful C.E.O.s and dignitaries who might one day help facilitate his next career move, or perhaps help him further pursue his longstanding interest in Florida politics.

Conde, in other words, is a true executive, and not the sort of emotional and creatively brilliant leader that many old timers are used to seeing in that seat. People gossip about his ambition, in part, because the guy is plainly ambitious—a business leader for an industry in duress, who seems to view his station as a proving ground for a larger opportunity. Guys with Conde’s job are always the source of endless gossip, but it’s all been exacerbated as the industry shrinks and talent and producers face fewer options and limited economic mobility. So it goes…

In this heated climate, certain observations about Conde’s leadership have started to resurface, going all the way back to the earliest days of his tenure. To wit, there was that time in April 2021, when NBC had booked former president George W. Bush and former First Lady Laura Bush as guests on the Today show, where they engaged in some heart-warming family banter with their daughter Jenna, a Today co-host. At the time, Conde had been spending most of his time in Miami due to the coronavirus pandemic—even Jenna sat six feet away from her parents that morning. However, when he learned that the Bushes had been booked on Today, he made a point of arranging plans to travel to New York for the broadcast to meet one-on-one with the former president.

Ostensibly, the chairman of the news division was the appropriate welcoming committee for a former United States president, but Conde, who had served as a White House Fellow in Bush’s administration, also seemed to evidence more personal motivations for getting himself in front of the prominent guest. Before the trip, Conde asked his office to send a copy of his personal biography to the Today show bookers, with an urgent request that it be forwarded to the Bush family office so that the former president could familiarize himself with Conde’s curriculum vitae in advance of their meet-and-greet. In the days leading up to the meeting, Conde’s office called the booking department several times to confirm that the document had been sent and that Bush had read it—a request that put NBC News personnel in the awkward position of having to seek insight into Bush’s literary digest from the former president’s own assistants.

Conde’s enthusiasm for such high-level bilateral meetings would soon become a feature of his tenure. As the world returned to some semblance of normal, Conde and his chief of staff, Emma Carrasco, began leveraging the power of the office, as they should, to get Conde in front of world leaders and other titans of politics and business. Like many major news organizations, NBC News has long hosted editorial board meetings with world leaders in the fourth-floor conference room at 30 Rock. Typically, the meetings are attended by journalists who have covered those individuals and their milieu. In the Conde era, though, many high-level NBC sources believe their boss uses these meetings to get himself in front of executives and dignitaries, and prioritizing his own one-on-one meetings.

Indeed, ahead of the United Nations General Assembly in New York each year, Carrasco convenes top bookers and editorial leads to go through a list of dignitaries whom Conde wants to meet. Conde has invited some of these folks, such as the president of Spain, to 30 Rock for leadership conversations, but those functions are held on the stately mezzanine floor and mostly feature executives and not reporters. Conde has also instituted a policy where the shows are asked to send Carrasco a list of the major bookings so he can decide if he wants to pay those guests a visit. In some instances, he has asked NBC journalists if they can help him arrange meetings with the likes of Elon Musk, Tim Cook, and LeBron James—albeit, in these cases, to no avail.

In 2021, Conde, a trustee of the Aspen Institute, signed a multi-year deal to make NBC News the exclusive partner of the Aspen Ideas Festival. The partnership ostensibly affords NBC News executives and talent the ability to meet with and interview business leaders and entrepreneurs onstage, though many interviews are moderated by journalists from other news outlets—recall Andrea Mitchell losing her exclusive Zelensky interview to CNN’s Fareed Zakaria last year—and, in any event, these interviews almost never make news. Instead, NBC and MSNBC employees who have attended the summit say Conde uses the forum to arrange a multiday session of one-on-one meetings with politicians and business executives.

Of course, this is Conde’s job. He’s supposed to meet with world leaders in the hopes that they choose an NBC platform for their next big sit-down. And he needs to have heady chats with Fortune 500 C.E.O.s because their marketing chiefs have billions in cash to spend. But, alas, Conde’s transparent ambition, on some level, is what seems so jarring to many of his charges. Lack, after all, concealed his own objectives with his congenial tone and messy coiffure. Conde, on the other hand, has a pronounced teleology that is off-putting in a business where there are plenty of big egos, sure, but they’re generally filtered with emotional intelligence. In the context of the McDaniel mess, remembrances of Conde’s extracurricular activities have caused journalists at both NBC News and MSNBC to once again question their boss, and whether one of America’s most storied news organizations should really be run by someone who seems to prioritize his personal and professional advancement over the concerns of the news division he leads. “It’s clear he’s using the perks of the job for himself,” one NBC News veteran told me. “Is it for corporate purposes or political purposes? I don’t know. What I do know is, it’s never been about us.”

Alas, it seems, the real saga here is taking place on a far more meta level. Back in the nineties and aughts, running a news division seemed like an incomparably large job. Even during Lack’s second tenure, he essentially retired in the seat. These days, though, the post is a breeding ground for ambitious executives like Conde, who either one day envision themselves in politics or as public market C.E.O. And even if they run the place, they are vastly outnumbered by sharp-witted employees who recall a previous era—a time when they made more, had better ratings, enjoyed more influence, and never had to worry about the future. The real tragedy of this whole Ronna McDaniel nightmare is that it’s actually the smallest problem that Conde, NBC, and everyone who badges in to work at 30 Rock or 400 North Cap has to worry about.