Yahoo Lifestyle Keith Olbermann Slams MSNBC for Cutting Ties With Joy Reid and Other POC Hosts: ‘A Purge So Brutally Racist It Makes You Think It Was Done by Musk’
Keith Olbermann, who dominated MSNBC as the host of “Countdown” from 2003 to 2011, railed against the network (via The Daily Beast) after it cut ties with hosts Joy Reid, Alex Wagner, Katie Phang, Jonathan Capehart and Ayman Mohyeldin. He posted on X: “An MSNBC purge so brutally racist it makes you think it was done by Musk.”
“They didn’t even try to hide the racism by firing an unnecessary white anchor like [Katy] Tur or [Stephanie] Ruhle as cover,” he added.
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On his “Countdown” podcast, Olbermann continued to address the matter by saying: “When the company is in trouble, when a dollar might not be earned, you won’t hear crap out of [Rachel] Maddow or [Lawrence] O’Donnell, or [Chris] Hayes, or [Symone] Sanders, [Michael] Steele, or [Alicia] Menendez, or Jen Psaki. I will profusely apologize to anybody at MSNBC who stands up in defense of Joy Reid and says, ‘This stinks. This makes us white. This is contributing to the entirety of the Trump racism enveloping this country.’”
Olbermann’s comment came ahead of Rachel Maddow’s Feb. 24 show on MSNBC, in which she directly called out the network for parting ways with Reid. Maddow said on air: “I do not want to lose her as a colleague here at MSNBC, and personally, I think it is a bad mistake to let her walk out the door.” She also called it “indefensible” that MSNBC’s “two non-white hosts in primetime are losing their shows.”
“Of course MSNBC’s firing of Joy Reid was racist,” Olbermann added in another post on X. “They’ve only had four women of color host their own shows. They’ve now fired them ALL.”
In yet another X post, Olbermann seconded Don Lemon in telling Megyn Kelly to “go fuck yourself” due to critical comments Kelly made about Reid following the latter’s MSNBC exit. Kelly called Reid the “absolute worst person on television.”
Listen to Olbermann’s full “Countdown” podcast on the MSNBC exits here.
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