MSNBC cancels Joy Reid’s lefty show as network makes major shake-up

Liberal mainstay Joy Reid has been one of the most prominent Trump-bashers in America’s mainstream media.

Joy Reid and Deeray McKesson attend the The Donald J. Trump Presidential Twitter Library Opening Reception in 2017. Picture: Getty Images

MSNBC liberal mainstay Joy Reid’s show has been cancelled as part of a major overhaul by the network’s new president Rebecca Kutler, according to a report.

The 7pm program hosted by ardent Trump critic Reid, 56, will be replaced by a new panel show featuring co-hosts Alicia Menendez, Michael Steele, and Symone Sanders Townsend, the New York Times reported, citing insiders.

The final episode of Reid’s show, “The ReidOut,” will air sometime this week, ending a mainstay of MSNBC’s line-up for the past five years, according to the Times.

MSNBC declined to comment.

It marks the first large-scale shake-up by MSNBC’s new president, Kutler, since she took over the liberal network earlier this month, as it looks to double down on its lefty agenda during the second Trump administration.

Reid, one of the most prominent Trump-bashers in the mainstream media, has been a fixture at the network since 2011, hosting the weekend talk show “AM Joy” since 2016 before being named anchor of the 7pm slot in 2020.

Born in Brooklyn to a Congolese father and Guyanese mother, Reid graduated from Harvard University in 1991 with a film studies concentration.

Joy Reid has been FIRED. Turns out calling your political opponents racist Nazis every night for an hour doesn’t get viewers pic.twitter.com/yFjPiAmRuY

— Libs of TikTok (@libsoftiktok) February 23, 2025

She worked for a local morning TV news program on WSVN Channel 7 in South Florida before temporarily leaving the media world in 2003 to join an activist group, America Coming Together, which focused on opposing the US invasion of Iraq and then-president George W. Bush.

Reid returned to the industry in 2006 as a radio talk show host, co-hosting “Wake Up South Florida,” then serving as managing editor of The Grio and as a politics columnist for the Miami Herald before landing her permanent MSNBC gig.

In December 2017, a series of homophobic posts on her personal blog, The Reid Report, were unearthed on social media in which Reid expressed disgust at the notion of men kissing, vehemently opposed gay marriage, trafficked in 9/11 conspiracy theories and accused gay men of being “attracted to very young, post-pubescent types.”

Initially, Reid denied penning the hateful missives and claimed her blog had been hacked, assertions The Daily Beast systematically dismantled in an analysis.

Reid opened an April 2018 episode of AM Joy on MSNBC with what critics said was a non-apology apology in which she admitted she couldn’t prove she had been hacked, but stuck to her claim that she couldn’t remember writing the posts.

Then in June of that year, Reid at last formally apologised for the blog posts, saying she was “a better person today than I was over a decade ago,” and calling the writings, “things I deeply regret and am embarrassed by.”

MSNBC never wavered in its support for the far-left anchor, saying the writings were “not reflective of the colleague and friend we’ve known at MSNBC for the last seven years.”

“I genuinely do not believe I wrote those hateful things because they are completely alien to me,” she said.

Joy Reid, fired today by MSNBC, said Joe Biden recovering from covid was the same as Trump surviving an assassination attempt. pic.twitter.com/5hY8UnlU3L

— Clay Travis (@ClayTravis) February 23, 2025

Reid has made a series of infamous rants in recent months, including telling Trump supporters to “make your own dinner” at Thanksgiving, saying they should “suffer the consequences of your votes.”

Kutler is making other major changes at MSNBC as she looks to change the fortunes of the network, where ratings have consistently trailed behind Fox News.

Alex Wagner — who has hosted weeknights at 9pm — is also losing her anchor chair after Rachel Maddow returned to five days a week at the network to cover the first 100 days of the Trump administration.

Genuinely shattered that the uniquely awful Joy Reid has been sacked. She has provided Lefties Losing It with so much content.

Not only is she a nasty, extreme Left race-baiter but she's stupendously stupid.
Let's hope The View give her a role 🤞🏽
pic.twitter.com/4LINFzMqQu

— Rita Panahi (@RitaPanahi) February 23, 2025

Maddow is set to return to anchoring just one day a week on Mondays later this year.

In December, Nielsen Media Research revealed that Reid had lost almost half her viewers since the election of Donald Trump, with MSNBC seeing a whopping 53% drop in prime time 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 7pm slot, Sanders Townsend, was previously a spokesperson for Kamala Harris before being hired by MSNBC in 2022. Reid worked on former President Barack Obama’s 2008 presidential campaign

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.

MSNBC and some of its fellow cable networks are being spun out by Comcast, forcing MSNBC to build up some of its own reporting and newsgathering infrastructure.

As part of these changes, Kutler is expected to announce a new MSNBC bureau in Washington DC in the coming months, where the company is hiring for a new Washington bureau chief as well as new heads of talent, newsgathering, and content strategy.

“Our jobs are hard on a normal day, and these are not normal times,” Kutler told MSNBC employees on the first day her role was announced by Mark Lazarus, the NBCU executive who is leading the new spin-off.

“It’s going to be hard, but it’s also going to be exciting and interesting and a really important time to do what all of us do.”

Among the other shake-ups expected, weekend host and former White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki will anchor one of the prime time hours during the week, a source familiar with the changes told The Post.

Kutler, in her previous role as MSNBC’s senior vice president of content strategy, spearheaded both Townsend and Psaki when they joined the network three years ago.

New York Post