Rachel Maddow Staff Get Axed Amid MSNBC Shake Up

Martin Holmes February 26, 2025, 9:49 am

Comments

The major shake-up at MSNBC continues to affect both on-camera talent and behind-the-scenes staff, with a new report claiming the majority of the team on Rachel Maddow‘s prime-time news show is being let go.

As reported by The Guardian on Tuesday (February 25), most of Maddow’s production team are set to lose their jobs, though sources told the outlet the staff will be given the option to claim severance or reapply for new roles at the network.

The publication notes that Maddow, who hosts MSNBC’s highest-rated show Mondays to Fridays, will get to keep her executive producer, Cory Gnazza, in addition to several other senior producers. However, the rest of her team will be axed, along with producers who worked on recently canceled shows hosted by Joy Reid, Katie Phang, Jonathan Capehart, Ayman Mohyeldin, and José Díaz-Balart.

On Monday (February 24), Maddow opened her show by speaking out against MNSBC for canceling Reid’s show, in addition to Alex Wagner losing her nightly prime-time show. “Personally, I think it is a bad mistake to let [Reid] walk out the door. It is not my call, and I understand that. But that’s what I think,” she said.

She also called it “unnerving” that “both of our non-white hosts in prime time are losing their shows, as is Katie Phang on the weekend.”

The Guardian reports that Maddow’s team was let go due to a “quirk” of how they worked on both Maddow’s and Wagner’s shows. Maddow had previously scaled back to hosting only Mondays but has returned to five nights a week for the first 100 days of President Trump‘s term. Wagner previously hosted Tuesday to Friday.

MSNBC's New Schedule: All the Major Changes Coming to the News Network

Jen Psaki, the former Biden White House press secretary, will take over the Tuesday to Friday slot once Maddow returns to Mondays only. Wagner will remain on as a senior political analyst for the network.

A network source told the outlet these changes were not “widespread layoffs” but instead a reallocation of producers to support new programs and priorities. The new roles are said to be posted internally first and wouldn’t be revealed externally until impacted employees have had a chance to reapply.

Maddow also addressed the staffing cuts on Monday’s show, telling her viewers, “Dozens of producers and staffers, including some who are among the most experienced and most talented and most specialist producers in the building are facing being laid off.”

She added, “They’re being invited to reapply for new jobs. That has never happened at this scale in this way before when it comes to programming changes, presumably because it’s not the right way to treat people.”