Joy Reid Leaves MSNBC But Won’t Stop Resisting
Sorry MAGA.
Joy Reid, once billed as a “heroine” of the resistance movement that emerged against Donald Trump, is leaving MSNBC after the network cancelled her show TheReidOut as part of the its bold new push toward irrelevance.
MSNBC president Rebecca Kutler announced on Monday: “Joy Reid is leaving the network and we thank her for her countless contributions over the years. Her work has been recognized with several esteemed honors, including most recently, the 2025 NAACP Image Award for Outstanding News Series.”
Kutler obviously can’t control the timing of Reid’s award, but the phrasing of her message is unfortunate, as it seemingly reinforces the fact that Reid is a Black journalist whose work directly confronts racial issues in politics. The statement just reads like “we’re no longer doing DEI so Reid should take her content elsewhere.”
Yes, MSNBC is steadily growing less diverse, both ideologically and superficially. Alex Wagner is losing her Joan Rivers/Jay Leno fill-in position on Rachel Maddow’s normal hour, and former White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki turned commentator is reported to replace her.
Maddow did call out her employers for the abrupt and somewhat callous way that Reid was cancelled.
The ReidOut reportedly suffered a significant decline in ratings in early December 2024, when most liberals were too shell-shocked to process the news. Prior to the election, Reid was averaging 1.4 million nightly viewers but that quickly dropped by 47 percent to just 759,000. TheReidOut’s cancellation is attributed to this decline in viewership. However, as mentioned, the ratings collapse was across the board.
MSNBC’s entire prime-time audience had dropped to just 632,000 by mid-December. CNN was down to 398,000. Non-Fox cable news was losing to the Food Network, which seems reasonable. During the first week of December Inside with Jen Psaki averaged 651,000 total viewers.
Obviously, MSNBC needs to make some drastic changes. When I lost some subscribers after Trump’s victory, I pivoted toward more Wicked content. I know I’d watch a nightly MSBNC show hosted by Cynthia Erivo or Jeff Goldblum, but MSNBC is taking a different route.
The New York Times reports that MSNBC plans to replace TheReidOut at 7 p.m. with an as-yet-untitled show led by former Democratic strategist Symone Sanders Townsend, former Republican National Committee Chair Michael Steele, and journalist Alicia Menendez, whose father is former senator and future inmate Bob Menendez.
The three currently co-host The Weekend, which airs when you might expect and currently has an audience of 631,000. Jonathan Capehart, Katie Phang, and Ayman Mohyeldin are also losing their own weekend shows, but Capehart and Mohyeldin will host separate editions of The Weekend.
So, many viewers tuned out on MSNBC and other mainstream liberal news outlets because they thought they didn’t effectively argue against Trump or make a compelling case to key demographics that they should turn out to vote against Trump, despite the price of eggs. Of course, MSNBC’s audience is demographically very similar to Fox News, just less brainwashed. It’s clear that Kutler might think that more overtly center-left programming will improve ratings. That’s predictable but still a little frustrating. For instance, after the 2008 and 2020 elections, Fox News didn’t dump their far-right hosts and replace them with more moderate talent in the hopes that they could broaden their appeal. No, they only further radicalized their audience.
It also seems completely out of touch to elevate Sanders Townsend, Steele, and Menendez, who are all very much establishment insiders. If MSNBC wants to change direction, at least recruit from outside the country club. Sanders Townsend spent most of the past couple years on news show gaslighting viewers about President Joe Biden’s continued fitness and overall popularity. It’s unlikely that viewers will hear anything that’s not just mainstream Democratic Party spin.
The usual racist suspects like Megyn Kelly and Donald Trump celebrated Reid’s departure, and some mainstream Democrats on social media also claimed this was a “good thing” for the party. Reid has apparently elevated too many “far-left” voices and too often criticized the Biden/Harris administration. It was interesting, if not surprising, to see people rooting against Reid who have “vote like Black women” or “listen to Black women” in their social media profiles. Those lines were always a shield against criticism from the type of Democrats who fetishize an idealized Black woman who conveniently shares the exact same political views.
I’ll probably have to keep reminding people of this, but Kamala Harris didn’t lose the election because Joy Reid criticized Joe Biden or even Harris herself. The voters Democrats have lost over the past decade don’t watch MSNBC.
Reid has aggressively confronted Trump on her show, and unlike her former colleagues on Morning Joe, she didn’t try to make nice with the incoming fascist regime. She dismissed the notion of calling a Thanksgiving MAGA truce: “Make your own sandwiches, wipe your own tears, troll amongst yourselves with Elon, and leave us alone.”
This naturally pissed off right-wingers, who regularly watch the likes of Jesse Watters and Matt Walsh. However, MSNBC shouldn’t worry about losing MAGA voters or even those with MAGA loved ones.
Trump wasn’t elected in an Obama 2008 (or even 2012) landslide, and his support has only cratered during his first month in office. Meanwhile, an overwhelmingly majority of Democrats want their elected officials to show more of a fight against Trump. There’s an audience for Reid, but it’s probably not at MSNBC, whose viewers are more likely to be the type of people who lectured you online about “civics” if you ever complained about Joe Manchin or Merrick Garland.
The Right’s obsession with Reid was always bizarre. Tucker Carlson and later Jesse Watters would often devote entire segments to Reid, when they both had exponentially larger audiences. They elevated her profile just so they could demand she shut up. I imagine that MAGA will still make a fuss over Reid’s opinions no matter where she ends up sharing them next.
Reid’s last show on MSNBC was Monday. Some advocacy groups suggested that her fans watch one last time and then switch off MSNBC all together. I am often skeptical of aimless boycotts, but if you’ve lost interest in MSNBC programming, there’s no compelling reason to think that the network will turn things around. This does seem like as good a time as any to move on and read more of my Wicked content.
Online liberal news and opinion outlets are doing very well. In fact, Medias Touch has surpassed Joe Rogan as the #1 podcast in the nation. Maybe Joy Reid can go that route, either on her own, or join up with an established online outlet. I never was big on watching cable news, but Morning Joke sucking up to trump after the election ensured that I'd never watch MSNBC again.
Unless one is a MAGAT, it is impossible to maintain the level of outrage necessary to consume the constant outpouring of suck that is the nightly news format. We all engaged heavily leading up to the election, realizing that engagement was crucial for a very consequential election. Now that the worst possible outcome has arrived, it's normal to step back and recuperate.
Of course, viewership has dropped away from a network that seemingly can't make enough wrong decisions fast enough. Unlike Fox News viewers, we can tell the difference between lies and truth, between propaganda and fact. MSNBC executives can't seem to get it through their pointy heads that speaking truth to power is what their viewers want, so they keep trying to insinuate a both sides narrative with disgruntled Republicans and blow-in-the-wind liberals.
Maybe the fractured media landscape makes it impossible to return to a standard TV news format any longer anyway? Once the old baby boomers like myself all die off, there won't be anyone left to even mourn the loss of a reliable Cronkite-like voice to guide us through the daily events. It's a new media landscape now.