With the news that MSNBC has cancelled Joy Reid’s prime time show, my Twitter feed filled up with the laments of the left over that, and the inevitable complaints that she was fired because of raaaaacism the network hates black women. Former Representative Jamaal Brown (D-NY) tweeted:

Joy Reid educated a nation every single night. She is a beacon on MSNBC and all of media! Shame on MSNBC for this. SHAME SHAME SHAME! We have to build our own multimedia empire. Anchored in truth, and justice and humanity. We stand up for Black people, and GAZA and the LGBTQ, and oppressed people and vulnerable people everywhere! And we will never stop!

I absolutely support the right of Dr Brown — he tells us that he’s an “Ed.D.” in his Twitter handle — to build his own multimedia empire! We have freedom of speech and of the press in this country, and anyone can say anything he wishes, can start and try to build a show, at network, a publishing empire, whatever.

Elie Mystal, whom Dr Brown included in his tweet, is the “Justice Correspondent and Columnist” for The Nation, the socialist-left opinion journal, so he had plenty of space to express his opinion.

The Value of Joy

By canceling Joy Reid’s cable news show, MSNBC has not only silenced a brilliant host: It’s silenced the next Black voice you haven’t yet heard.

by Elie Mystal | Tuesday, February 25, 2025

Elie Mystal, from his author page on The Nation.

Joy Reid is responsible for my signature afro. It was late 2018; I was in the makeup chair at MSNBC, and the makeup artists said, “You have such nice hair.” My hair was getting pretty long, and I thought she was nicely telling me it was time to get it cut, as older Black women in my life were always telling me whenever I’d let my hair get too long. I assured her that I was going to the barber shop right after my Saturday spot on AM Joy.

Joy was in the chair next to me. She slowly turned to me and said, “Do you like being on television?” I said, “Yes,” and she said, “Then I would keep your beautiful Black hair.” My hair had long gone gray by that point, but she wasn’t talking about its color. She broke it down for me, explained how television was a visual medium, and told me that my afro was a “signal” to viewers that I was bold and unafraid. I countered with how I had been told to keep my hair “high and tight” (around white folks) for fear of their dismissing what I had to say because they were unused to seeing natural Black hair. She told me to pay those types of people no nevermind, and added: “Not everybody could pull it off, but you can. Your hair matches what you say.”

I never did go to the barber after the show. My mother is still pissed about it.

I’ve told that story to a lot of people and, for many white people, it’s just a cool “behind the scenes” story about how television gets made. Black folks, for the most part, understand that our little conversation was much deeper. I was essentially making “respectability Black” arguments: accepting the premise that to succeed in a white world, I had to look like they wanted me to look. Joy was telling me to not play their game, to be my full authentic self on television, and trust that viewers, especially Black viewers, would have my back. They did.

Well, he talked about his afro, so I had to include his author pic! Oddly enough, those of us why remember watching Dr J, Julius Irving, playing for the New York Nets of the ABA, and then later the Philadelphia 76ers, weren’t somehow repelled by the afro hairstyle. Listening to Van Vance call Kentucky Colonels‘ games on WHAS, and wanting the ABA to survive weren’t worried about Artis Gilmore’s afro!

Over the weekend, MSNBC canceled Joy’s primetime show, The ReidOut. The network followed up by canceling Ayman Mohyeldin’s show, Jonathan Capehart’s show, Katie Phang’s show, and announced that Alex Wagner will not be returning to the 9 pm weeknight slot when Rachel Maddow leaves it again in April. The white hosts at the network remain, as of now, unaffected. What’s happening over there is not subtle.

Cable news has never been truly comfortable with authentic Black voices. That’s true of every type of media, and every medium, owned and operated by white folks, but cable is particularly difficult for Black people to break into because you need practice at it before you get any good. It’s not easy or natural to answer complicated questions in 35-second sound bites while somebody is screaming “WRAP IT UP!” in your ear. It’s harder still when you’re trying to figure out if you’re allowed to give the truthful answer to the question, or only the white answer to the question. God forbid you’re trying to parse all that while making a joke or adding some flair to your answer, or while saying something different, something more unconventional than what was just said by the guest before you or will be said by the guest coming up after. And it’s intimidating when you’re doing it all live and know that anything you say can and will be used against you by Tucker Carlson.

Is Mr Mystal telling us that he was trying to formulate “the white answer,” as opposed to “the truthful answer”? Why, I have to ask, would Mr Mystal be telling us that he wasn’t always telling what he saw as the truth because he he was trying to placate massa?

Yes, I said that, and I will, of course, inform Mr Mystal of this article via Twitter, but what other impression could one take from what he wrote?

“(A)nything you say can and will be used against you by Tucker Carlson”? Well, if you say something stupid, yes, or course it will!

There’s a lot more, much of it about the opportunities Mrs Reid provided for up-and-coming black talent. But what isn’t in there? There was nothing in Mr Mystal’s article about Mrs Reid generating a sufficient audience to keep her show on the network. The New York Post reported:

In December, Nielsen Media Research revealed that Reid had lost almost half her viewers since the election of Trump, with MSNBC seeing a whopping 53% drop in primetime viewership following the Nov. 5 result before rebounding somewhat in the four weeks following the presidential inauguration.

She was earning a lofty $3 million annual salary to host her nightly news commentary program, until MSNBC required her to take a steep pay cut that same month in order to keep her job along with fellow network host Stephanie Ruhle.

One of Reid’s replacements in the 7 p.m. slot, Sanders Townsend, was previously a spokesperson for Kamala Harris before being hired by MSNBC in 2022. Reid worked on President Barack Obama’s 2008 presidential campaign

(Rebecca) Kutler, a former senior executive at CNN, has made it clear that MSNBC faces unique challenges as it looks to work with a Trump White House and prepares to be spun off into a new publicly traded company along with other NBCU cable networks.

Hat tip to Robert Stacy McCain!

Comcast is ‘spinning off’ MSNBC and some of its other networks, CNBC, the financial network being one, and that means those networks have to do something really radical like earn enough money to support themselves, including losing some of NBC’s reportorial and office staff.

Miss Kutler was hired away from CNN to rescue MSNBC, which seems like an odd move given that CNN’s ratings are even lower than MSNBC’s! A community member on The Lost Kos tried to tell people that Miss Kutler is “stupid,” but what I see her as is desperate. MSNBC is going to be facing increased expenses to stay on the air, and she has to increase ratings, or the network will simply fail.

Perhaps most amusing in all of this are the people who will be replacing Mrs Reid, Symone Sanders Townsend, Michael Steele and Alicia Menendez. So many of our good friends on the left have said that it’s raaaaacist to fire Mrs Reid, but she’s being replaced by two black and one Latina as hosts. That shows a new direction for MSNBC, more of a panel show than a one-host presentation, in hopes of bringing in a larger audience, but it certainly isn’t racist. Whether it succeeds remains to be seen.

No one seems to say it, but the outrage over Mrs Reid’s dismissal is DEI, diversity, equity, and inclusion as a cultural concept by our friends on the left. The anchors set to replace Mrs Reid certainly meet the diversity part, moreso than Mrs Reid alone, and they are certainly inclusive.

But it’s the equity part that gets them! The left believe that Mrs Reid should be retained as a matter of equity, as a matter of giving her a break from her poor ratings just because she’s black. That she should be judged based on the audience she attracts, just as any white broadcaster/cablecaster is, is anathema.