Joy Reid’s MSNBC show is being canceled as part of a sweeping overhaul of the network’s primetime line-up.
One of the network’s liberal mainstays since 2014, Reid’s latest show—the 7 p.m. weeknight broadcast The ReidOut—will air for the final time later this week, a source familiar with the changes confirmed to the Daily Beast.
The source said that MSNBC president Rebecca Kutler plans to announce broad programming changes that will potentially impact shows across its daytime, primetime and weekend schedule.
Slated to replace The ReidOut is a new show co-anchored by Symone Sanders-Townsend, Michael Steele, and Alicia Menendez, who currently helm MSNBC’s The Weekend.
Their program will air during the 7 p.m. hour from Tuesday to Friday, and for two hours beginning at 7 p.m. on Mondays.
Variety, Puck and the New York Times first reported various elements of the MSNBC overhaul, including The ReidOut‘s pending cancellation.
An MSNBC spokesperson declined to comment.
The progressive Reid is one of the networks' best-known anchors, and was first tapped to helm the 7 p.m. primetime hour in 2020 after hosting the weekend morning chat show AM Joy for four years.
A scathing critic of President Donald Trump during his first term, she was dubbed by the Times as “a heroine of the resistance to his leadership.” The paper noted “her forceful questioning style, matching that on conservative outlets like Fox.”
On Saturday, her show won an NAACP Image award. The news of the show’s cancelation was met with dismay by some leading Democrats.
“I am deeply saddened that Joy-Ann Reid, the only African American woman with her own show on MSNBC, will no longer be seen,” former Atlanta mayor Keisha Lance Bottoms, who former President Joe Biden considered as a running mate in 2020, told the Daily Beast. “As there is a daily effort to counter misinformation and disinformation, it seems counterintuitive to silence a voice who brings an often unheard perspective.”
Reid’s time at MSNBC was not without controversy.
In 2018, homophobic posts made under her name on her former blog were unearthed and Reid repeatedly insisted, without evidence, that she did not write them.
She later offered a defiant non-apology apology, doubling down on unsubstantiated assertions that her blog was hacked.
A Daily Beast analysis found purported evidence offered up by a consultant hired by Reid did not hold up to scrutiny. After the initial homophobic blog posts emerged, the Daily Beast suspended Reid as a regular columnist.
Further entries uncovered by journalists and social media users showed posts on Reid’s blog under her name had told readers to watch a widely discredited 9/11 conspiracy theory film co-produced by Alex Jones, and included an image of the late Senator John McCain’s head photoshopped onto the body of the Virginia Tech mass shooter. Reid apologized for those posts.
The trio selected to replace Reid will represent a wider spectrum of anti-Trump constituencies, although will still include a strong progressive voice.
Sanders-Townsend was the national press secretary for the 2016 Democratic primary campaign of democratic socialist Senator Bernie Sanders (I-VT).
Steele is an anti-Trump Republican who was once the party’s chairman, and Menendez is a longtime journalist, liberal commentator and organizer.
Menendez is also the daughter of disgraced former Senator Robert Menendez (D-NJ), who resigned after he was convicted on federal corruption charges last year. (She recused herself from covering his case.)
Kutler’s plans to remake MSNBC are expected to to impact other top network stars.
Rachel Maddow, the ne plus ultra of the network’s liberal commentators, is hosting her hourly 9 p.m. show five days a week for the first 100 days of the Trump administration, after cutting back to Mondays only in 2022.
When MSNBC announced Maddow’s temporarily expanded gig, the network said Alex Wagner, the host of the 9 p.m. hour from Tuesday to Friday, would return to her slot in late April.
But those plans have changed, and Wagner is not expected to return, the source who spoke to the Daily Beast said. She will remain with the network as a correspondent.
MSNBC is still considering possible replacements, and among them is Jen Psaki, the one-time White House press secretary to former President Joe Biden, though no final decisions have been made.
Psaki, who joined MSNBC in 2023, hosts a twice weekly show that airs on Sunday afternoon and Monday evening.
Kutler is also looking outside of the network for potential new hosts and contributors: among those in discussions with the network are Politico reporter Eugene Daniels and New York University professor of law Melissa Murray, the source familiar with MSNBC’s changes said.
The source added that Kutler is currently hiring for a head of talent, head of newsgathering, Washington bureau chief, and head of content strategy, with plans to establish an MSNBC Washington Bureau in the coming months.
In addition to that, Cutler plans to add several new domestic and international correspondents to the network.
The network makeover comes as MSNBC is being spun off from parent Comcast as part of a new entity that will include CNBC, USA Network and other cable channels. NBCUniversal executive Mark Lazarus will lead the new venture, dubbed SpinCo.
It also comes as cable news networks are grappling with digital disruption that has severely cut into their core revenues.
Variety reported that analysts at market research firm Kagan estimate MSNBC will lose roughly 10.5 percent of its subscribers between the end of 2023 and the end of 2025, and that CNN and Fox news will likely suffer proportionate declines.
After an initially turbulent post-election drop, MSNBC’s ratings have rebounded since Trump was sworn into office, beating out CNN as liberal and left wing viewers have flocked to its combative coverage of the new administration.
Trump on Saturday railed against both CNN and MSNBC, which he called a “threat to democracy.” He claimed: “These people lie... they are a vehicle of the Democrat Party.”
In the four weeks following Trump’s inauguration on January 20 MSNBC’s weekday primetime audience average was 1.4 million viewers, up 77 percent from pre-inauguration viewership of 799,000 from December 30 to January 19.
