In recent days, news network MSNBC has made headlines for a prime time programming shakeup that has canceled the only two primetime shows led by nonwhite hosts. Now in addition to widespread backlash, Rachel Maddow, the network’s most high profile, has openly called out the network on her own MSNBC show.
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On Monday, MSNBC’s new president Rebecca Kutler sent out a staff memo announcing changes to programming. The network, she explained, was officially cancelling Alex Wagner’s show, Alex Wagner Tonight, and it canceled The ReidOut and fired the show’s host, Joy Reid.
Wagner and Reid were the network’s only nonwhite hosts in primetime slots. Now, after four years as one of MSNBC’s highest rated shows and a day after she’d won two NAACP Image Awards, Reid taped her last episode on Monday.
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As rumors of the cancellations churned over the weekend, MSNBC has been fending off backlash, and viewers are not the only ones upset. MSNBC’s most recognizable host, Rachel Maddow, called out executive leadership during The Rachel Maddow Show.
“At a network where we’ve got two—count ’em, two—nonwhite hosts in primetime, both of our nonwhite hosts in primetime are losing their shows, as is Katie Phang on the weekend,” Maddow said. “And that feels worse than bad, no matter who replaces them. That feels indefensible, and I do not defend it.”
But the shakeup is not only limited to these shows. “Dozens of producers and staffers, including some who are among the most experienced and most talented and most specialist producers in the building, are facing being laid off,” Maddow explained. “They’re being invited to reapply for new jobs.
“That has never happened at this scale in this way before when it comes to programming changes, presumably because it’s not the right way to treat people, and it’s inefficient, and it’s unnecessary.”
While Maddow criticized all of these layoffs and cancellations, she described why Reid’s firing is personal for her. “In all the jobs I have had in all of the years I have been alive, there is no colleague for whom I have had more affection and more respect than Joy Reid,” Maddow said. “I do not want to lose her as a colleague here at MSNBC, and personally, I think it is a bad mistake to let her walk out the door.”
Maddow ended on an optimistic note, hoping for the best but calling on executives to do better. “We welcome new voices to this place and some familiar voices to new hours,” she said. “It’s going to be great, honestly. And we want to grow and succeed and reach more people than ever and be resilient and stay here forever.
“I also believe, and I bet you believe, that the way to get there is by treating people well.”
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