Joy Reid wonders who really controls the news after shock MSNBC firing

Joy-Ann Reid is speaking out about what she believes led to her abrupt and unexpected firing from MSNBC. Reid said her firing came as a shock, particularly because MSNBC had renewed her contract just weeks earlier, despite tensions over her coverage of the war in Gaza and President Donald Trump. She recalled believing the renewal meant she had more time at the network, even if executives were not entirely pleased with her reporting.

“I had literally just had my contract renewed, so typically, if you do not want to hang on to a show, you don’t renew the person. You simply say, ‘We thank you for your time with us. We won’t be renewing you.’ But I had literally just gotten renewed at the end of 2024, at the end of the year. So we did our end of the year renewal. It was a bit of negotiation, so my agent was like, ‘You know what, it looks like we’re only going to do a one year [contract].’ Previously, they’d done multi-year renewals. So we were like, ‘They only want to do one year. That’s fine. We’ll just do the one year. We’ll keep it moving. We’ll figure it out after that if we’re going to be here.’ We knew they were not super thrilled about some of the way that I was covering things like Gaza, some of the ways that I covered Trump. And that had been sort of a struggle over social media. They renewed. And once they renewed, we took a sigh of relief,” Reid said during a recent appearance on Forward by Charles M. Blow.

But her relief was short-lived. “We renewed, and then the show won the NAACP Image Award. So now we’re in January, and all of our communications with management were congratulatory.” Reid says Rashida Jones announced she would be leaving the network, and Rebecca Kutler would be ushered in as the new president of the network. Reid says it was not surprising that Kutler would be appointed to the role, as she and some others at the network suspected she was being poised to get the promotion.

Simultaneously, Reid says Jones was asked by staff and talent whether she was staying in senior meetings, and she wouldn’t provide a direct answer. She says that two weeks before being fired, she had friendly conversations with Kutler, joked about redecorating Kutler's new office space and planned to take Kutler to lunch, which is why her firing was shocking. “Our communications went from ‘Congratulations on winning the NAACP Image Award’ to ‘We won’t be renewing your contract,’” Reid explained, noting the firing was done via phone, and she described the tone of the call from the execs as “weird” and “robotic.”

Before her firing, Reid received a phone call from a colleague warning her that rumors were circulating that both she and the colleague would be let go. She initially dismissed the warning because her contract had already been renewed. However, she grew concerned when a member of her own team later raised the same rumors, particularly after she saw them mentioned in a Substack post.

Reid also questioned whether her firing was driven by more than routine programming changes, suggesting that the personal beliefs and political leanings of network executives may have played a role in decisions about which journalists and perspectives were allowed to remain. She pointed to the decision to eliminate her entire show's staff as particularly unusual, noting that MSNBC had handled her previous show cancellations differently.

In those instances, the network kept her on for special projects before eventually giving her another program, while members of her production team were also retained between assignments. This time, however, both she and her staff were let go, leading her to question whether the decision reflected a broader shift in the network's tolerance for certain viewpoints and coverage.

A former colleague told Reid that her coverage of the war in Gaza had upset network executives and the new management. Reid acknowledged that complaints about her reporting had been filed with HR, but said they came from anonymous sources.