Shake-up for Trump era gives liberal MSNBC a whiter, more centrist look

The Guardian

02-03-2025

The brutal shake-up at MSNBC, the liberal news channel that has been been at the forefront of scrutinizing Donald Trump and his politics, could lead to the loss of progressive voices and stories affecting people of color, media experts said.
All of this arrives at a time when the Trump administration is actively attacking the media.
MSNBC announced on Monday that the progressive host Joy Reid was being fired from her weeknight show, with Alex Wagner also losing her prime-time nightly broadcast. Katie Phang and Jonathan Capehart also lost their solo weekend shows, along with Ayman Mohyeldin, who has been a fierce critic of Israel's bombing of Gaza. A 'bloodbath of non-white anchors', as the Daily Beast termed it, as the move was widely criticized, including on MSNBC.
'Indefensible,' was the verdict of Rachel Maddow, the channel's highest-profile host, as she lambasted the network live on her show on Monday. 'I think it is a bad mistake to let [Reid] walk out the door. It is also unnerving to see that on a network where we've got 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.'
Other criticism was even more strident. Elie Mystal, justice correspondent at the Nation, wrote on X: 'I owe the television part of my career to Joy Reid, as do so many other Black voices y'all never would have heard of if not for her. And *that's* why she's gone. They can treat black folks as interchangeable, but everybody Black knows that Joy was indispensable.'
Mehdi Hasan, a progressive journalist and Guardian columnist whose MSNBC show was canceled in 2023, wrote: 'It's a big loss for MSNBC viewers as [Reid] did talk about issues – racism, fascism, Gaza – that other hosts have avoided. And I'm also sad to see my brilliant friend Ayman lose his unique show, too.'
Phang and Wagner will remain with the network, Phang becom​ing a legal correspondent and Wagner a political analyst, and​ Capehart and Mohyeldin will become co-hosts on other programs. But with non-white journalists underrepresented in the media, the loss of those voices from prime-time shows and at the helm of their own programs represents a blow for those concerned about diversity.
'Joy Reid represents another loss of amplifying Black and brown voices who will report news on stories that oftentimes go under the radar or underreported by mainstream journalists,' said Emmitt Riley, a professor of politics and African and African American studies at the University of the South and the president of the National Conference of Black Political Scientists.
'When we think about what diversity truly means, it means that we bring a wide variety of perspectives to the table. And certainly a person's life experiences with discrimination, their life experiences in terms of where they occupy certain positions of power or lack thereof, informs what stories they decide to amplify. And so we saw Joy covering a number of different stories that I think will go under the radar now.'
Along with losing the perspectives that journalists from a range of backgrounds and life experiences can bring, there is also concern that MSNBC is losing progressive voices and sidelining some of its most prominent critics of Israel, including Reid and Mohyeldin.
At a time when Trump has made it clear that he will offer little support to Gaza – last week the president shared an AI video showing the US turning it into a cross between Dubai and Las Vegas – the loss of those voices is a concern.
Reid's show will be replaced by Symone Sanders Townsend and Michael Steele, who are Black, and Alicia Menendez, who is of Cuban descent. Although Sanders has progressive bona fides as a former national press secretary for Bernie Sanders, Steele is a former chair of the Republican national committee who describes himself as 'an American, a conservative and a Republican, in that order'.
Menendez also has deep connections to the center of US politics – her father is Bob Menendez, the former Democratic senator who in January was sentenced to 11 years in prison for taking bribes. Her brother, Robert Menendez, is a Democratic congressman.
Wagner, who in 2022 MSNBC described as the only Asian American to host a prime-time cable news program, platformed critics of Joe Biden as he declined in mid-2024. She will be replaced by Jen Psaki, who served as Biden's White House press secretary and previously had roles in communications for centrist Democrats including Barack Obama and John Kerry.
'It is going to change the discourse,' said Heather Hendershot, a professor of communication studies and journalism at Northwestern University.
'It's still going to be in keeping with the MSNBC brand, it will still be liberal. But they're moving a little bit away from the left with these recent changes.'
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The moves came two weeks after the Federal Communications Commission, led by the Donald Trump appointee and Project 2025 co-author Brendan Carr, launched an investigation into Comcast, MSNBC's parent company over its diversity, equity and inclusion policies, part of a broader policy which has seen Trump order an end to all DEI programs in federal government and also target the programs in schools and universities.
'At a time when the very value of diversity in American institutions is in question, implementing changes which result in firing and demotions of the channel's highest-profile non-white anchors seems a bizarrely off-brand action for a news channel that is supposedly liberal-oriented,' Eric Deggans, an NPR TV critic and media analyst, wrote on his Switching Codes Substack.
It is a delicate time for Comcast, which is seeking approval to spin out MSNBC and other cable shows into a new company, called SpinCo, later this year. The shake-up also comes as other media organizations have been targeted by the Trump administration.
The FCC is investigating NPR and PBS to assess whether they should be continued to be allowed access to public funding, while Trump is suing CBS, alleging that they selectively edited an interview with Kamala Harris – something CBS denies – and has threatened legal action against the New York Times, among others.
There are signs some news organizations are already acquiescing to Trump. This week Jeff Bezos, who pulled an endorsement of Kamala Harris in the run-up to the 2024 election and later attended Trump's inauguration, announced that the Washington Post editorial pages would in the future only publish pieces 'in support and defense of two pillars: personal liberties and free markets'.
The Post's former editor, Marty Baron, described the move as a 'betrayal of the very idea of free expression' that had left him 'appalled', and the Post's opinions editor quit in the wake of the move, which could further hit the Post's number of subscribers – 250,000 people previously canceled their subscriptions after Bezos blocked the Harris endorsement.
At MSNBC, Mark Lazarus, who is set to be CEO of SpinCo, told staff at a meeting: 'The only thing I'll say is the worst thing any leader can do is change something that's working just because they can. So, if this is working, then there's no reason to change it.'
However, Oliver Darcy reported for Status that Lazarus had suggested he would like the network to be on better terms with Republicans.
'The SpinCo boss, who now oversees the progressive network, has privately indicated to people that he would like the outlet incorporate more GOP voices on its air,' Darcy reported.
Apart from the need to have media that stand up to the Trump administration, left-leaning organizations were missing an opportunity by not standing their ground, Hendershot said.
'Part of the bigger picture of MSNBC is that now is the time for these stations or newspapers or magazines that lean left, to lean into what they do best. Anything that slants left does the best in terms of ratings when the right is the White House. And likewise, when the other party is in the White House, publications who are on the right do best,' she said.
'If you lean toward objective coverage of the authoritarian situation we find ourselves in right now, your numbers could go up, whether you're MSNBC or the New York Times or whatever entity. So it's hard not to read it as bowing to the authority of the White House. I don't see any other interpretation. That's certainly how Trump sees it.'