MSNBC’s Death Rattle
The ostensibly liberal news network is just the latest mainstream media organization to bend to the political winds.
Society / February 28, 2025
The ostensibly liberal news network is just the latest mainstream media organization to bend to the political winds.
Ayman Mohyeldin is losing his weekend evening MSNBC show. Dave Zirin writes that Mohyeldin was one of the few MSNBC anchors who provided honest coverage of Israel’s war on Gaza.
(Photo By Harry Murphy / Sportsfile for Web Summit Qatar via Getty Images)For 20 years, I’ve been a regular guest on MSNBC. Some of my most memorable media experiences were on the network: I provided analysis immediately after the death of Muhammad Ali and then again from outside Ali’s Louisville funeral; I was pulled out of a shower by frantic calls to get me on the air to comment on Kobe Bryant’s death in a helicopter crash, which I did not know had happened; and I defended athletes who didn’t conform to gender binaries way back in 2009 back when “terf” was just a playing surface football players wanted to avoid. My favorite times were being part of lengthy roundtables with Dr. Melissa Harris-Perry and her #nerdland crew, a show that before its abrupt cancellation featured an array of eclectic academic and movement voices.
I never had blinders on about the network’s limitations: MSNBC was always Charmin soft on the Democratic Party, and at times, it would propagandize for Israel’s decades’ long war on the Palestinian people (with the strong exception of anchor Ayman Mohyeldin). But my thinking was that as long as I never half-stepped my politics and took the openings that existed to speak in defense of Palestine, I was playing a modest role in bringing a radical analysis through sports to an otherwise center-liberal network. A highlight was being able to praise Egyptian soccer player Mohamed Aboutrika as one of the 2008 sports stories of the year for wearing a “Sympathize with Gaza” shirt on the pitch, which they showed the television audience while I was explaining the significance of his brave actions. That was on, of all things, their citadel of centrism Morning Joe. It brings me joy to remember Scarborough looking befuddled as to why this had somehow become a part of his show.
But after Trump’s most recent election, I told a head booker to put out the word to not contact me anymore. This wasn’t grandstanding—I knew it wouldn’t matter in the network’s corridors. It was more for myself. I wrote to them that if doing this for 20 years as a political intervention resulted in the Musk dictatorship, then I was wasting my time and needed to focus on other ways to facilitate change. I had also been disgusted by the network’s coverage of Israel’s genocidal war since October 7 (again with the exception of Mohyeldin). But I’m going public with this decision now, because MSNBC has become the latest mainstream media organization to bend to the political winds.
Under their new boss, Rebecca Kutler, who helped oversee CNN’s transition into something only watched in airports, MSNBC has gone on a bloodletting, axing almost exclusively news anchors of color. That seems to be a shared trait of her most high-profile firings or reassignments to lesser roles: Joy Reid, Jonathan Capeheart, Katie Phang, Alex Wagner, and the aforementioned Mohyeldin alongside the “stepping down” of Lester Holt as host of NBC Nightly News. These folks all have different shades of politics; their shows didn’t all have low ratings; it isn’t even that none of them are white—although that commonality screams out. It is that they have all been targeted by Trump and his online brownshirts.
If it was really ratings, it does not explain why Morning Joe, whose numbers have cratered since Joe and Mika’s chastened trip to Mar-a-Lago after the elections, are secure. (The amount of newsroom demoralization that trip caused was something that I heard from multiple sources.) The only person on the network to speak out publicly was its biggest star—and the person one would think to be the safest—Rachel Maddow. The beloved Maddow, back to hosting every night for the first 100 days of the Trump reign and upon whose ratings the entire operation spins, said, “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 prime time, both of our non-white hosts in prime time 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.”
Good for Rachel Maddow, who also included a heartfelt tribute to her dear friend and longtime target of the Trumpist right, Joy Reid. The response from Kutler, or whomever Kutler is carrying water for, wasn’t to fire Maddow, but to gut her production staff. It certainly looks like Maddow is being punished for calling out the boss.
Kutler is treating these loyal, popular, and profitable hosts the way Elon Musk treats federal workers: slash, burn, create chaos, and end up with what I promise will be a failure. In MSNBC’s case, it will settle upon a CNN-esque product that nobody watches unless their plane is delayed in Charlotte. The replacements for these hosts are once and future employees of leading Democrats like Jen Psaki and Symone Sanders-Townsend; Alicia Menendez, the daughter of disgraced former Democratic Senator Bob Menendez; and former Republican National Committee chief Michael Steele who after years of elbowing for a show finally got one at the expense of a liberal host. The diversity of the new hires, clearly aimed to squelch the idea that this was a racial mass firing, doesn’t change the fact that MSNBC’s programming is now politically monochromatic—and moving as far to the right as the Democratic Party will allow.
One cannot separate Kutler’s cuts from the walking, talking mid-life crisis known as Jeff Bezos and his assassination this week of the integrity of The Washington Post. It’s part of the compliance agenda of the mainstream media. What’s hilarious about the exceedingly plastic 61-year-old Bezos is that no matter how old he gets, he always looks like he’s enduring a mid-life crisis. When he’s 80, he’ll probably still be overcompensating by buying yet another penis-shaped car. Less funny is him forcing out the opinions-editor David Shipley and banishing viewpoints other than those that are, in his instantly infamous word, “in support and defense of two pillars: personal liberties and free markets”. Translation: The only “personal liberties” allowed will be the liberty to write in defense of people like Jeff Bezos. And free markets will be exalted, but probably not the free market of ideas (or the freedom to form unions.) Going forward the Post will be a battering ram at the service of our new gilded-age overlords: Pravda for parasites.
Kutler’s racialized ideological pogrom of MSNBC and Bezos’s Orwellian blather are more examples of voluntary compliance with an addled orange authoritarian and his cruelly stupid cabinet of reality-show carnies. Moments like this make it clear that it’s not just Musk and Trump who are destroying the country’s most essential programs and firing its workers. It’s the “masters of the universe” racing to kiss their feet. These bootlicking billionaires aren’t complying out of fear or because they respect the barely awake Trump and his eroding popularity. They have been waiting for years to be narcissistic peacocks, living in a world where people are forced to cheer their vulgarities. They are past wanting money. They desire power, “followers,” and adoration. They are also snowflakes, demanding the legal ability to crush anyone telling truths about what they are and who they harm. The Washington Post opinion page has been murdered and is being resurrected as a mouthpiece for the ghost of Augusto Pinochet, while MSNBC is now sounding its death rattle. No FBI agent shuttered their doors. No thugs marched to their front steps. No legislation was passed. They surrendered willingly.
So that’s it for me with MSNBC. Frankly I’m relieved to know that I never have to fool myself again into thinking that, in the words of former NFL player Arian Foster, that “a gladiator alone can change Rome.” Yes, we can’t do it alone. We have to come together, and I don’t see it happening inside a system run by self-interested oligarchs and fearful executives. We have no choice but to read, promote, and support independent media rooted in the adage that the real purpose of our work is to “afflict the comfortable and comfort the afflicted.”
Keep ReadingDave ZirinDave Zirin is the sports editor at The Nation. He is the author of 11 books on the politics of sports. He is also the coproducer and writer of the new documentary Behind the Shield: The Power and Politics of the NFL.
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