Truth And Media Consequences

Joy Reid is out at MSNBC

Almost a decade ago, when ad rates were still okay, before Facebook killed the blog pages, Joy Reid gave me the single greatest payday of that phase of my career. She tweeted a link to a story, now long gone, in which I speculated that members of Donald Trump’s family had agreed to the 2016 Trump Tower meeting because they genuinely believed Russia had Hillary Clinton’s lost emails. Traffic surged and I made hundreds of dollars from that single tweet.

As one might expect, writers in our little virtual newsroom reacted to this development by writing stories that we thought Joy Reid, or any other MSNBC personality, might find interesting. She became the target audience. I blame ‘the Joy Reid effect’ more than any other factor in the decline of liberal blogs at the beginning of the first Trump administration.

Today X, the social media site formerly known as Twitter, deprecates outbound article links. It is no longer a good platform for generating web traffic. Google wants users to read AI-generated gists of search results without visiting any links. If you still somehow manage to draw a million sets of eyeballs to your web page, the ad rates are low. As a result, most of the old liberal websites are dead, while the remaining ones are struggling to stay in business.

This is why writers moved to Substack. This is how small teams of creators moved to YouTube. Subscription platforms, channel memberships, and community engagement are the new business models for media. A large corporation like Comcast cannot sustain the costs of an MSNBC anymore, so it is being spun off, and the new president Rebecca Kutler is making changes. Reid will host her final show this week, no longer as relevant as she was as a morning host in 2016.

The basic problem for MSNBC is that they split an audience with the even more-woeful CNN, and it is a smaller audience than Fox News. In fact, Joy Reid’s show, The ReidOut, is not only dead last of the three networks in her time slot, it is out-performed by Megyn Kelly’s YouTube channel. I will let entertainment news channel WDW Pro explain the numbers.

To be sure, the November election results have helped this shakeup happen. Reid’s staff reportedly had a “tense” meeting with network management. In a development that should surprise no one, Reid protegé Elie Mystal blamed racism for the decision. Reid is reportedly being replaced by a panel that includes Michael Steele, who is black but has unacceptably center-right politics. Reid’s politics are what Mystal finds “indispensable” about her.

As illustrated by my lived experience, Joy Reid may be “indispensable” to a narrow slice of everyday viewership. That is, people like Mystal do exist, and they likely feel bereft without her guidance, but they are not an audience that can sustain a news network, especially not now that linear and cable television are dead. MSNBC was consistently a higher-tier channel on streaming platforms, but did not justify the added expense.

It turns out that MSNBC is very dispensable to Comcast, that Joy Reid is very dispensable to MSNBC, and that both are very dispensable to the disappointed news consumer. Viewership crashed after the November election result and did not bounce back completely after Inauguration Day. It turns out that when your audience feels misled, they tend to stop trusting you.

Rachel Maddow has returned to weekday resistance in order to justify her $25 million contract. As the network’s biggest property, she remains ‘essential,’ but she too has lost audience share because too many viewers felt misled too many times. Joy Reid has been demoted to Maddow’s guest commentator again, the same role she had when she started at MSNBC in 2014. But it is a whole different world, now.