Rachel Maddow is calling out her own network, MSNBC, for firing its “non-white hosts.” And where’d she do that? On her MSNBC TV show. “I will tell you it is also unnerving to see that on a network where we’ve got two — count them, two — non-white hosts in prime time, both of our non-white hosts in prime time are losing their shows, as is Katie Phang on the weekend,” Maddow said, per the Daily Beast. “And that feels worse than bad, no matter who replaces them. That feels indefensible, and I do not defend it.”
Maddow specifically took issue with the cancellation of Joy Reid’s show, The ReidOut. Reid took over the weeknight time slot in July 2020, making her the first-ever Black woman to anchor a prime-time news show, on MSNBC or otherwise. “I am 51 years old. I have been gainfully employed since I was 12, and I have had so many different kinds of jobs you wouldn’t believe me if I told you,” Maddow said. “But in all of 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.”
The network’s new president announced the cancellation in a memo on February 24. “I have been through every emotion over the past several days,” Reid said on a livestreamed video call with the Win With Black Women podcast. “From anger, rage, disappointment, hurt, you know, feelings of guilt that I let my team lose their jobs. But in the end, where I really land and where I’ve landed on today is just gratitude, just pure gratitude.”
“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 continued. The ReidOut will be replaced in the interim by Symone Sanders-Townsend, Michael Steele, and Alicia Menendez, current hosts of The Weekend, per the Washington Post, and Jen Psaki will also join the network, as part of the changes made by new MSNBC president Rebecca Kutler. Kutler has not yet responded to Maddow’s criticism.