New MSNBC Bloodbath of Non-White Anchors After Joy Reid Forced Out

MSNBC on Monday announced a major overhaul to its primetime lineup that will go into effect in April.

The revamped schedule promotes progressive anchors Jen Psaki and Symone Sanders-Townsend to primetime while booting its largely non-white weekend lineup of hosts off their namesake shows.

Anchors Jonathan Capehart, Katie Phang, and Ayman Mohyeldin are losing their eponymous weekend shows. Capehart and Mohyeldin will instead be one of multiple hosts of separate editions of The Weekend at 7 a.m. and 6 p.m., respectively, while Phang will remain with the network as a legal correspondent with no anchor slot. Its other Miami-based anchor, José Díaz-Balart, will also lose his show, though he will remain as host of NBC’s weekend edition of Nightly News.

Psaki will replace Alex Wagner’s Tuesday through Friday 9 p.m. hour in April after Rachel Maddow completes her five-day-a-week stint during President Donald Trump’s first 100 days, MSNBC president Rebecca Kutler announced on Monday. Wagner will stay on as a senior political analyst.

MSNBC’s The Weekend hosts—Symone Sanders Townsend, Michael Steele, and Alicia Menendez—will take over the 7 p.m. hour from Joy Reid, who will leave the network, and the 8 p.m. hour on Mondays.

Ali Velshi’s Velshi will also expand to a three-hour, 10 a.m. to 1 p.m. show to make up for Psaki’s weekend show at noon. Most of the changes will take affect in April, Kutler told staff in a memo on Monday.

The broad changes come as MSNBC severs its ties from NBC after Comcast spun most of its cable networks into a new SpinCo company headed by Mark Lazarus. As part of its new independence, Kutler said she wanted to expand the network’s Washington, D.C., operation with a new bureau of domestic and international correspondents.

“As I shared with many of you a few weeks ago, my goal is to build on the successes that have distinguished MSNBC from its peers,” Kutler told staff in a memo. “We now have one of the most engaged audiences in all of television and are seeing rapid growth across digital, audio, and more. In the years ahead, we must continue to show up for our audiences in this critical moment while simultaneously best positioning ourselves for the future.”

The changes also signals MSNBC’s desire to lean into its progressive voice for its older viewers (its viewers’ median age is 70, according to The Wall Street Journal), even as Lazarus has reportedly wanted to appeal to more Republicans. The network has seen its primetime audience grow 77 percent since Trump’s inauguration last month after a nosedive following the election, and many of its programs have punched back at the Trump administration’s policies.

via: Daily Beast

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