MSNBC host Rachel Maddow said Monday on “The Rachel Maddow Show” that her network made a “bad mistake” firing host Joy Reid.
Maddow said, “Joy Reid’s show, the ReidOut ended tonight, and Joy is not taking a different job in the network. She is leaving the network altogether and that is very, very, very hard to take. 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. 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. I love everything about her. I have learned so much from her. I have so much more to learn from her. 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. It is not my call and I understand that. But that’s what I think.”
She continued, “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 primetime, both of our non-white hosts in primetime are losing their shows, as is Katie Phang on the weekend. And that feels worse than bad, no matter who replaces them. That feels indefensible. And I do not defend it.”
She added, “But there’s just one other piece of it that you should know. From your side of the TV screen, you will mostly see changes in terms of who’s in the anchor chair, and actually everybody who’s going to be in anchor chairs from here on out are great colleagues and great at what they do. And you are not going to be disappointed in who’s on our air and what you’re going to be seeing. But one thing you cannot necessarily see is that the people who get our shows on the air, they’re really being put through the ringer.”
Maddow concluded, “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. 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, and it kind of drops the bottom out of whether or not people feel like this is a good place to work So we don’t generally do things this way.”
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