Network star who earned $30 million to appear on TV once a week laments racist firing of Joy Reid, who earned 10 times less for more work
Joy Reid hosted the final episode of her MSNBC show on Monday, but it was her exorbitantly paid white colleague, Rachel Maddow, who made headlines later that evening by accusing her bosses of racism. “I will tell you it is also unnerving to see that on a network two, count ’em, two non-white hosts in primetime, both of our non-white hosts in primetime are losing their shows,” Maddow said. “That feels worse than bad no matter who replaces them. That feels indefensible, and I do not defend it.” She was referring to Reid and Alex Wagner, the half-Asian MSNBC personality who was expected to begin hosting the 9 p.m. hour in April, but that plan was scrapped. Jen Psaki, a white woman and former White House press secretary under President Joe Biden, will take over instead.
Watch: Joy Reid Concludes Lackluster Career at MSNBC
Reports suggest MSNBC fired Reid for perfectly legitimate reasons. The host was constantly inviting “external scrutiny” with her vitriolic and racially charged diatribes, according to former CNN media expert Oliver Darcy. Also, her ratings were terrible. Last Thursday’s episode of The ReidOut drew just 59,000 viewers between the ages of 25 and 54, the only demographic advertisers care about. That was the lowest figure among all MSNBC hosts between 4 p.m. and 11 p.m. MSNBC is in the process of being spun off from parent company Comcast, which viewed the left-wing network as a “declining asset” whose elderly viewing audience is literally dying off. To survive as a separate entity, MSNBC will have to massively curtail its payroll costs. Getting rid of Reid, a low-performing loose cannon with an annual salary believed to be in the range of $3 million, was probably an easy call.
Maddow’s rant against MSNBC’s white supremacy was rich with irony, given the fact that until recently, Maddow was earning $30 million a year to host The Rachel Maddow Show just one night per week. That’s roughly 10 times what the network was paying Reid, a proud black woman, to work significantly more hours. MSNBC hosts Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski, who are white, are also believed to have negotiated a “Maddow-esque” compensation package, while Maddow look-a-like Chris Hayes is believed to earn a salary in the $4-5 million range. These highly paid network personalities are often eager to discuss topics such as income inequality and the “racial wealth gap,” but they have yet to express public outrage about the alarming racial disparities within MSNBC.
Related: MSNBC Host Claims ‘There Isn’t a Strain of Racism on the Left’
Reid and Wagner weren’t the only non-white employees who lost their hosting gigs. As a result of the network’s ongoing reorganization, MSNBC announced plans to cancel the weekend shows hosted by Ayman Mohyeldin, Jonathan Capehart, Jose Diaz-Balart, and Katie Phang. Mohyeldin, the Egyptian-born commentator best known for defending Hamas terrorists, is believed to earn a salary in the range of $500-750K per year. Al Sharpton, the scandal-plagued charlatan and notorious anti-Semite who appears to have survived what former MSNBC host Keith Olbermann described as a “racist purge,” is believed to earn a similar salary.
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Salary information for Phang was unavailable due to the fact that no one has heard of her. The Katie Phang Show has apparently been on the air since 2022. She also hosted a 2023 special on MSNBC about female “trailblazers in the [Asian American and Pacific Islander] community.” Phang enjoyed a brief moment of relevance in November 2024 after she criticized Scarborough and Brzezinski for meeting with Donald Trump after the election. “Normalizing Trump is a bad idea,” she wrote. “Period.” It’s not yet known whether the Morning Joe hosts played a role in the cancellation of Phang’s show.
Watch: Media Go on Racist Tirade Against Black Republican Tim Scott
These are precisely the sort of changes MSNBC will be required to make if the network’s ultra-wealthy (and white-privileged) hosts are unwilling to sacrifice a “fair share” of their massive salaries. Maddow has reportedly already taken a modest pay cut and is now believed to earn $25 million a year for part-time work, money that could be used to fund hundreds if not thousands of full-ride university scholarships for marginalized non-white students. Think of all the non-white jobs Maddow, Scarborough, and Brzezinski could save by agreeing to earn just $1 million per year. Better yet, they could channel the wise words of Barack Obama (net worth: $70 million), who once said, “At a certain point, you’ve made enough money,” by forgoing their entire salaries or agreeing to donate 100 percent of their earnings to anti-racist charities dedicated to the eradication of white supremacy.
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In any event, it’s unclear why MSNBC’s alleged concern about minimizing “external scrutiny” due to outbursts of vitriolic insanity did not extend to the Morning Joe duo, whose coverage of Trump during the election was so unhinged the network briefly suspended the show after Trump was nearly assassinated in July. Maddow’s deranged activism has also caused problems for the network, which recently settled a $30 million defamation lawsuit filed after Maddow and several of her white colleagues made “verifiably false” statements about a Georgia doctor they accused of harvesting uteruses at an immigration detention facility.
Watch: Rachel Maddow Says MSNBC Won’t Broadcast ‘Untrue Things’
Olbermann, who did more than anyone to boost Maddow’s career at MSNBC, recently argued that Maddow would never “do anything for principle,” suggesting the network host is motivated by a desire to hoard wealth and power at the expense of vulnerable minorities. She has reportedly amassed considerable influence at the network. Nevertheless, she was apparently unable to stop Reid’s firing, which she claimed was “a bad mistake.” The extent to which Maddow lobbied MSNBC brass behind the scenes to make the network less diverse remains unknown. She might not look like a woman, but she is. Racism experts have repeatedly explained that white women, even the liberal ones, are guilty of “perpetuating the violence of White Supremacy, especially against Black bodies.”
This, ladies and gentlemen, is the smiling, bespectacled, and filthy-rich face of white supremacy.
