As Joy Reid, Lester Holt and more depart, TV news faces a 'very nervous moment'

On an otherwise quiet Sunday afternoon in late February, MSNBC dumped veteran anchor Joy Reid and canceled five shows. Then, less than 24 hours later, "NBC Nightly News" anchor Lester Holt announced that he, too, would step down this summer after a 10-year run.

In normal times, this much TV news would be big news — except now it's all just part of the New Normal, say veteran TV observers.

Since the 2024 election, more than a dozen top network anchors and reporters have left or been forced out, among them some of TV's most visible, including Jorge Ramos (Univision), Chuck Todd, Hoda Kotb (both NBC News), Andrea Mitchell (MSNBC), Chris Wallace and Jim Acosta (CNN), Norah O'Donnell (CBS) and Neil Cavuto (Fox News).

Their respective networks offered the usual reason — time to move on — and, for the most part, those who voluntarily headed for the exits appeared to concur.

Meanwhile, new presidents in the White House are often accorded changes or adjustments to the TV press corps that covers them. Some turnover is always expected.

But what's happened these past few weeks goes far beyond some "exploring new chapter" anchor pivot or quadrennial "adjustment," these TV observers say.

In fact, it's unprecedented.

NETWORK NEWS UPHEAVAL

These observers say Holt's announcement is unrelated to the rash of changes at MSNBC. He'll join "Dateline" full time, after he steps away from "Nightly." 

Nevertheless, "I look at this unquestionably as the biggest collective period of upheaval in network TV news that we've seen in a very, very long time," said Mark Lukasiewicz, dean of Hofstra University's Herbert School of Communications, formerly a top producer for ABC and NBC News.

What's going on, these observers say, is a perfect storm that's enveloped an entire industry. It's been fueled by a set of factors that range from business-as-usual challenges — ratings — to the near-apocalyptic in TV news terms. Streaming has exploded at the same time the political climate turned sharply against the traditional TV news media. And though Fox News is doing just fine, postelection ratings have taken a big hit at CNN and MSNBC; they've recovered somewhat at MSNBC, but CNN is still struggling.

Meanwhile, those once-famously generous anchor salaries have been slashed across the board. (According to various reports — none confirmed by CBS News — O'Donnell's $8 million salary was cut in half, and she's now transitioned to reporting at the network.)

Then, there's this: CBS News' parent, Paramount Global, is also about to be sold to West Coast-based Skydance, which has no background in TV news. Comcast has plans to split NBCUniversal in two, with the old-line broadcast properties like NBC News remaining with NBC, while many of its cable networks — including MSNBC and CNBC — are siloed into something at the moment called "SpinCo."

"Everyone is under pressure and they haven't figured this out yet nor do they have a lot of time to figure it out," said Jonathan Wald, formerly a senior executive and producer with NBC News, CNBC, MSNBC and CNN, now working with  former "Nightly" anchor Brian Williams on creating new media ventures, such as the election night coverage forum they mounted for Amazon Prime.

"You could sweep all of this together and find a cohesive theme, but the truth is that this is stuff that happens all the time," Wald said, "except that it's happening in an environment where the commander in chief is paying closer attention."
 

'A VERY NERVOUS MOMENT'

Over the past year, President Donald Trump has indeed turbocharged one of his favorite talking points — the so-called "fake news" media — by suing ABC News for defamation and "60 Minutes" over campaign interference. (ABC settled by donating $15 million to his presidential library; the CBS lawsuit — tied to quotes that had been edited from a Kamala Harris interview — appears headed for mediation.) On that Sunday after the MSNBC revamp, he posted on Truth Social that "this whole corrupt operation [MSNBC] is nothing more than an illegal arm of the Democrat Party."

Last fall, the French-based free press advocacy group, Reporters without Borders, published a study counting the number of instances Trump had attacked print and TV reporters during campaign events leading up to the election — 108, between Sept. 1 and Oct. 24. The authors reasonably observed "that American media — and in turn, the wider public — may be growing numb to the existential threat Trump’s attacks pose to American press freedom."

There are some of those benumbed who now fear that a chilling, or self-censoring, effect has begun to spread over broadcast news.

MSNBC's new president, Rebecca Kutler, told staffers in a Feb. 24 memo  that the flurry of cancellations was meant to "position" the network for the future. But during the monologue of her own MSNBC program, Rachel Maddow said "It's unnerving to see on a network where we’ve got two nonwhite hosts in prime time [Reid and Alex Wagner], both losing their shows, as is Katie Phang on the weekend. And that feels worse than bad no matter who replaces them — [it] feels indefensible."

Besides Reid, Wagner and Saturday host Phang, the others who lost their shows were Jose Diaz-Balart, Ayman Mohyeldin and Jonathan Capehart. 

 Tom Bettag, a veteran producer who ran "Evening News" and ABC's "Nightline" for decades — now a lecturer with the University of Maryland's Philip Merrill College of Journalism  — calls this "a really difficult moment in TV news for a whole bunch of reasons — networks aren't willing to pay [anchors] as much, and the 'Voice of God' anchor is long gone." 

 "But what's going on between the White House and the mainstream press is alarming. Does this lead people [at the networks] to say, 'Is this the right moment for me to get out?' Yeah, you can't help but think about that but when you factor in all those other things, this does make for a very nervous moment."

THE FCC FACTOR

In one of Trump's first acts last fall, the president-elect picked Brendan Carr as chairman of the Federal Communications Commission, and by mid-February, Carr took direct aim at Comcast, owner of MSNBC.   

He said he would launch an investigation of the company because it had supported diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives, then added in a statement, “I would encourage any business that wants the FCC to approve a deal to end" DEI. He also threatened to look into the Paramount/Skydance deal over the "60 Minutes" Harris interview.

Kim Zarkin, a communications law expert and Salt Lake City-based Westminster University professor who has studied and written about the FCC for three decades, said in an interview that the Commission has no authority in this area, "so this is very much what we have always called 'regulation by raised eyebrow' " — or an implied threat. 

The FCC could, in fact, target the TV license renewals of CBS (which owns 15 stations) and NBC (owner of 12). Such challenges are onerous for the networks to fight, she said, which could push back the timetable on their restructuring deals. 

Indeed, there's a long history of presidents pulling levers like these to get the TV coverage they want. 

 "I don't want to speculate what's going on internally at the networks at the moment, but there's definitely strong historic precedent of presidents trying to intimate the press," which does occasionally lead to a chilling effect, said media scholar Jon Marshall. President Richard Nixon, for example, got CBS to trim a prime-time documentary on Watergate. The Obama administration briefly (and unsuccessfully) barred Fox from the White House press pool. Marshall — a Medill School of Journalism professor at Northwestern University who's written extensively about this history, most recently in the book "Clash: Presidents and the Press in Times of Crisis" — said these efforts eventually do backfire. 

More turnover to come

But will they this time?  The exodus of prominent anchors and reporters is expected to continue, industry experts say, while pointing out that many of those who had left already — like Acosta, Cavuto, Reid, Ramos and Wallace — had been subjected to relentless criticism by Trump.

Then there's always what Hofstra's Lukasiewicz said could become a cloaked form of self-censorship that's perhaps hidden even to those anchors and reporters covering the White House.

"The good news is that there is still a lot of good reporting that's happening right now and for that reason it's hard to say if there is a chilling effect," Lukasiewicz said. "But we also know there are many employees of the Justice Department who did the job they were assigned and now are fired or under the threat of prosecution. It's not a far leap to imagine there might be [TV] reporters across the country who might have a worry in the back of their heads that they too might be subject to that kind of prosecution by the federal government.

"It's hard to tell what kind of effect that would have on them."