Things appeared to be coming to a head between cable news host Melissa Harris-Perry and MSNBC executives, as the weekend anchor suggested this week she may soon be out of a job after complaining about losing editorial control over her show.
“I will not be used as a tool for their purposes,” she wrote in a private email to her colleagues. “I am not a token, mammy, or little brown bobble head. I am not owned by Lack, Griffin or MSNBC. I love our show. I want it back.”
“Here is the reality: Our show was taken — without comment or discussion or notice — in the midst of an election season,” the note added. “After four years of building an audience, developing a brand and developing trust with our viewers, we were effectively and utterly silenced.”
The letter, which was first obtained by the New York Times, comes after weeks of rumors alleging that she and her employers had come to a major disagreement over the network’s 2016 programming schedule.
Harris-Perry has hosted her show since 2012. She said in an interview with the Times that she refuses to go on her program this weekend, and said it is because she has lost editorial control of her show. She was reportedly told that her show needed to focus more on the 2016 presidential election, despite that she prefers to talk more about “social justice” causes.
A couple of weeks ago, @MHarrisPerry went into her Twitter bio and deleted “Host of @MHPShow.”
— Brian Stelter (@brianstelter) February 26, 2016
In the cause of raising awareness for “social justice” issues, Harris-Perry once appeared on-air wearing tampons as earrings. The choice of homemade jewelry was done in protest of anti-abortion legislation in Texas.
She is also well-remembered for arguing in 2013 that, “Our kids … belong to all of us and we have a collective responsibility to them.”
Later, in 2015, she again drew attention to herself when she argued on her show that the term “hard worker” was problematic as it can sometimes be applied to people who don’t work as hard as African-American slaves were made to work.
Harris-Perry told the Times this week that “she had received no word about whether her show … had been canceled, but said she was frustrated that her time slot had faced preemptions for coverage of the presidential election.”
“She said she had not appeared on the network at all ‘for weeks’ and that she was mostly sidelined during recent election coverage in South Carolina and New Hampshire,” the report added, explaining that her show had been “preempted each of the last two weeks, and for the most recent edition, on Super Bowl Sunday.”
The weekend host has been asked to return to her show this weekend.
Though Harris-Perry is uncertain if NBC News chairman, Andrew Lack, or MSNBC president Phil Griffin, were involved in her show supposedly being sidelined, she intimated in her email that she believes they are to blame.
NBC, for its part, would only say in a statement, “In this exciting and unpredictable presidential primary season, many of our daytime programs have been temporarily upended by breaking political coverage, including M.H.P. This reaction is really surprising, confusing and disappointing.”
Harris-Perry, who is black, also stressed in her interview with the Times that she does not think race played a role in the recent changes to MSNBC’s lineup.
“I don’t know if there is a personal racial component,” she told the newspaper. “I don’t think anyone is doing something mean to me because I’m a black person.”
She added in her interview that not being able to talk to her viewers felt like a “betrayal.”
“It is perfectly fine, 100 percent reasonable and perfectly acceptable for MSNBC to decide they no longer want the M.H.P. show,” she said. “But they should say that, they should cancel the show, they should stand up. And maybe it would be rewarded with huge ratings, but they shouldn’t kill us by attrition and take us off the air without telling anybody, including us. That for me is what’s painful and difficult.”
Harris-Perry later made her letter to her colleagues available to the public, and had the note uploaded in its entirety to Medium Friday afternoon.
“I have stayed in the same hotels where MSNBC has been broadcasting in Iowa, in New Hampshire, and in South Carolina, yet I have been shut out from coverage. I have a PhD in political science and have taught American voting and elections at some of the nation’s top universities for nearly two decades, yet I have been deemed less worthy to weigh in than relative novices and certified liars,” the full letter reads.
“I have hosted a weekly program on this network for four years and contributed to election coverage on this network for nearly eight years, but no one on the third floor has even returned an email, called me, or initiated or responded to any communication of any kind from me for nearly a month. It is profoundly hurtful to realize that I work for people who find my considerable expertise and editorial judgment valueless to the coverage they are creating,” it added.
A spokesperson for NBC News did not respond to the Washington Examiner’s request for comment.
