Throughout this weekend’s “Saturday Night Live” Weekend Replace, co-anchor Michael Che identified an uncomfortable fact: NBCUniversal is dropping two distinguished Black information anchors on the identical time.
MSNBC anchor Joy Reid, who beforehand crammed the 7 p.m. slot, has been let go as a part of a large reshuffling of expertise on the information cabler. And NBC Nightly Information anchor Lester Holt announced this week that he was departing after a decade within the chair.
That, in fact, led Che to quip that maybe he’s the following to go.
“This week, MSNBC fired its solely non-white primetime host, and Lester Holt introduced he’s stepping down because the anchor of NBC Nightly Information,” Che mentioned. “Nicely, NBC, just one extra to go, child,” he added, as he pointed to a photograph of himself.
Che has co-anchored “SNL‘s” Weekend Replace with Colin Jost since 2014, having changed Cecily Sturdy within the function. (Che and Jost had served as co-head writers at SNL from 2017 till 2022.)
The departures of Reid and Holt have come from very completely different corners: Holt introduced his personal departure this week in a memo to employees: “After 10 years, 17 in the event you embody my years on the weekends, the time has come for me to step away from my function as anchor of ‘Nightly Information.’ It has really been the glory of a lifetime to work with every of you each day, conserving journalism as our true north and our viewers on the heart of every thing we do,” Holt wrote. He concurrently introduced that he would stay at NBC Information and focus his work on “Dateline.”
As for Reid, who has been a weekday mainstay at MSNBC since 2020 (when she replaced veteran Chris Matthews), the departure has include far more controversy. That included criticism from inside MSNBC, the place star host Rachel Maddow blasted her employer for letting Reid go. “Pleasure Reid’s present, ‘The ReidOut,’ ended tonight. And Pleasure isn’t taking a special job within the community. She is leaving the community altogether and that’s very, very, very onerous to take,” Maddow said on Feb. 24. “I don’t wish to lose her as a colleague right here at MSNBC, and personally, I believe it’s a unhealthy mistake to let her stroll out the door.”
