Tiffany Cross opened up this week about MSNBC suddenly severing ties with her in 2022, claiming she lost her weekend morning show because she had “drawn the ire of white conservatives.”
She also asserted that her “abrupt” firing was “very intentional” on the part of MSNBC executives, who wanted the rest of the industry to see her as “so unhireable that we could not trust her with a live mic” and therefore didn’t allow her to issue a farewell to her viewers on air.
Cross, alongside fellow cable news refugees Angela Rye and Andrew Gillum, recently launched a new weekly podcast called Native Land Pod. After Rye used last week’s debut broadcast to deliver her own “testimonial” on what led to her departure from CNN, suggesting it was tied to ex-CNN anchor Chris Cuomo’s alleged inappropriate texts to her, Cross discussed her exit from MSNBC on Thursday’s show.
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MSNBC did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
According to Cross, her notoriety on MSNBC’s airwaves first ratcheted up following a segment on the network’s flagship morning program Morning Joe. After a heated exchange about race and the GOP with host Joe Scarborough, who she described as MSNBC’s “favorite white boy,” she began “trending” on social media, and this regularly happened following her increasingly regular Morning Joe segments.
At the same time, she alleged, Scarborough went to network brass to not only complain about her but also to tell them that Cross shouldn’t be the successor to Joy Reid on the weekend morning slot. At the time, Reid had recently moved to weeknights and the network was looking for her permanent weekend replacement.
“There’s an unspoken rule that you’re not supposed to disagree with Joe, and I didn’t get that memo,” Cross said.
Despite Scarborough’s purported efforts to sabotage her, Cross was eventually tapped to replace Reid’s AM Joy Saturday slot, debuting The Cross Connection in late 2020. According to the progressive host, though, she immediately began butting heads with the network over the content of her show, claiming MSNBC just wanted her to focus on Donald Trump.
“It was a battle to cover things that I wanted to talk about. The network’s philosophy was Trump, Trump, Trump. They wanted me to be part of the echo chamber,” she declared. “I wanted to cover things like inhumane treatment in prisons, that’s something that disproportionately impacts my community. Mental health among Black men, the erasure of Afro-Latinos in the Latino community, land battles of the indigenous, Native Americans trying to get their family artifacts back from museums right here in America. Black farmers, reaching Latino voters, things like that.”
Saying she was “spoken to in the most condescending ways” during her battles with network execs, Cross added that she was confused as to why they wanted her to “use the same recycled faces you see all the time” when she routinely had the highest-rated weekend show on MSNBC.
“I would have somebody sit across from me and explain to me how news works,” she bemoaned. “I had my intelligence questioned.”
In the end, though, Cross believes it all went downhill when then-Fox News star Tucker Carlson turned his attention towards her, accusing the Black host of fomenting a Rwandan-style race war with her show’s commentary. While Carlson’s claim that Cross was inciting genocide against white people resulted in the Anti-Defamation League condemning the far-right nationalist host, Cross noted that MSNBC did not publicly have her back at the time.
“After this, the network did not issue a statement the way they had for some of my white colleagues who had also been targeted by MAGA extremists,” she said. “Instead, executives spoke to me and instructed me that I could not respond to Tucker Carlson at all, and then they began to scrutinize my show and every little thing I wrote.”
At the same time, Cross continued to deliver searing commentary about conservatives after the Carlson kerfuffle, which she claims further irked network executives. Specifically, she noted that she snarkily called Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas “Justice Pubic Hair on My Coke Can.” Additionally, during an infamous sit-down with Charlamagne tha God in the fall of 2022, Cross referred to Florida as the “dick” of America and that it should be “castrated,” taking aim at Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis’ policies.
“After that show… that morning, I got a call from the president of the network saying they were not going to be renewing my contract, which was up in a month, and that my viewers would not even be given the courtesy or the respect of me not being able to sign off or have a final show,” she declared.
“When that happens, it suggests to other people in the industry that this person is so unhireable that we could not trust her with a live mic,” Cross continued. “The firing was very abrupt, and it was very intentional to my audience, my viewers, that you are not the type of viewers that the company cares about. I was devastated when my show was canceled. I was so sad.”
Stating that she was “never given an official reason” why the Cross Connection was canceled, Cross said that “it was pretty obvious that I had drawn the ire of white conservatives.” Cross also took issue with the network torching her through the media, as well as MSNBC President Rashida Jones suddenly doing interviews with The View and other talk shows.
“The network began attacking me,” Cross said. “They planted hit pieces in the press. The president of the network began a bizarre, unhinged tour where she was on damage control; I don’t know what she was trying to do.”
At the time of Cross’ exit, a network source told The Daily Beast that “Cross’s commentary had repeatedly crossed the line by failing to adhere to the network’s editorial standards,” explicitly pointing to her remarks on Charlamagne tha God’s Comedy Central program. Meanwhile, MSNBC staffers fretted that the network had just handed a win to Carlson, which would only encourage him to target more of the channel’s personalities.
