By Rich Lowry
Wednesday, February 26, 2025
No one can accuse Rachel Maddow of inconsistency —
she has turned MSNBC-thinking against MSNBC.
It was inevitable that the network devoted to accusing
people of racism would accuse itself of racism for canceling the show of an
African-American host famous for accusing people of racism.
After all the talk on MSNBC’s air of systemic racism and
white privilege, it turns out that the call has been coming from inside the
house.
The network, of course, canceled Joy Reid’s show, as well
as discontinuing Alex Wagner’s role in hosting Rachel Maddow’s hour when Maddow
is not there (which is most of the time). Also canceled were Katie Phang,
Jonathan Capehart, and Ayman Mohyeldin.
Maddow was shaken, as she let her listeners know during a
rare occasion when she was hosting her own show.
“Personally, I think it is a bad mistake to let her walk
out the door,” Maddow said of Reid on Monday night, insisting that she’s
learned immensely from her erstwhile colleague whose program was consistently
lunatic and ill-informed.
“It is also unnerving,” Maddow continued, “to see on a
network where we’ve got two, 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.”
And so Maddow has sniffed out the subtle racism affecting
the network that has employed her in a high-profile role for years. MSNBC’s new
president, Rebecca Kutler, has had a long career in TV during which she has,
heretofore, kept her white hood hidden, but so insidious is the subtle hand of
institutional racism that she apparently has fallen prey to it.
It gets even worse when you think about it. Morning
Joe, hosted by Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski, airs for four hours
every day, while Nicolle Wallace holds down two hours every weekday afternoon.
Why should three white people — one of them a white male
from the South with a firm gender identity, although a fluid political identity
— control six hours of programming every day? It’s practically settler
colonialism.
Maddow might have considered, too, that she herself is
white, meaning that for years before she began hosting her show only on Mondays
— making the way for Alex Wagner on the other weeknights — she had monopolized
the 9 p.m. hour of MSNBC for white people. She might further consider that when
she had agreed to briefly return to five-day-a-week hosting for Trump’s first
100 days, she supplanted an Asian-American woman.
Perhaps Maddow would say in her defense that this is what
her bosses wanted, but does that really lessen her complicity? If she figured
that it was only for 100 days, she should have thought more about how long
non-white women have waited to get any representation during the 9 p.m. hour
on MSNBC.
One wonders, given this thoughtless exercise of
privilege, whether Maddow is a true ally, no matter what she might say on air.
Realizing that they were vulnerable to attacks based on
MSNBC-thinking, the MSNBC honchoes didn’t, by the way, replace Joy Reid with
one non-white host, or even two non-white hosts, but with three! (Symone
Sanders Townsend, Michael Steele, and Alicia Menendez will be co-hosting.)
Who, they might have asked themselves, could possibly
object to that on racial grounds? Well, clearly, they underestimated Rachel
Maddow, who stipulated that it doesn’t matter who was replacing the non-white
hosts.
Admittedly, perhaps it would have been better if MSNBC
hadn’t decided to segregate so many non-white hosts in the 7 p.m. hour, and
instead distributed them more evenly throughout the programming — say, with one
non-white host keeping 7 p.m. non-white and the others taking hours
currently held by white hosts and making them non-white, too.
Surely, if Nicolle Wallace were asked to make a sacrifice
for racial justice by giving up just one of her two hours every afternoon,
she’d happily oblige.
If it were a different administration with a different
Justice Department, perhaps MSNBC could enter into a consent decree with DOJ to
have an independent court monitor keep a close watch on its programming
decisions. Failing that, there’s always the option of inviting a U.N. special
rapporteur to review the white/non-white balance in its lineup.
One of Martin Luther’s insights was that sin is so
pervasive that even when he was confessing at great length and in detail, he
couldn’t confess enough. At MSNBC, that’s how they think about racism — no
matter how comprehensively they denounce it, they, too, must be guilty.
Joy Reid obviously didn’t want to lose her show, but part
of her should be pleased that the hidden prejudice of her former bosses has
finally been revealed.
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