A Fired MSNBC Star, Joy Reid, Says She Received ‘a Tenth’ the Pay of Male Colleagues Who Worked ‘Less Hours,’ Calls Herself Victim of Racism

Joy Reid, who was fired from MSNBC in February, is now alleging that she was paid a tenth of what her male colleagues made, and she says they worked fewer hours. She also made comments suggesting she was discriminated against at MSNBC because she is black. Ms. Reid was terminated as part of a reorganization of the cable channel, as it struggled to turn around its plummeting ratings after the 2024 election. In December 2024, Nielsen Media Research showed she had lost about half of the audience for her show, “The ReidOut.” The former host, however, insists that when she was fired her show was performing better than the network’s other prime time shows. The show that replaced hers, a panel show featuring Symone Sanders, Michael Steele, and Alicia Menendez, has been performing worse than Ms. Reid’s show.At the time of her termination, Ms. Reid had also become a lightning rod due to offensive, racist remarks she made on air, in particular remarks regarding white women. Late on election night in 2024, when it appeared that President Trump had won North Carolina, Ms. Reid said on the air, “Black voters came through for Kamala Harris. White women voters did not. … It’s a state where women lost their reproductive rights, where there was a very heavy push to get women to focus on not … putting back into the White House the person who was responsible for taking those rights away. And restoring them. But that message obviously was not enough to get enough white women to vote for Vice President Harris, a fellow woman.”Network insiders said at the time that Ms. Reid was too provocative and controversial to have on board at a time when the Trump administration is coming down hard on media companies.While speaking at the Martha’s Vineyard African American Film Festival, the former host bemoaned the “curse of competency.”“The curse of competency means you’re the best person at what you do,” Ms. Reid said. “You know more than everyone else because you’ve had to do more work and more research to get where you are, and so therefore you’re the one everybody calls.”She added, “Which means that because you are the best at it, you actually work the hardest, do the most hours, work the most overtime, and don’t get paid commensurate to the amount of work you do.”She then turned to her time at MSNBC, where she said she was “paid a tenth of the salary of people who did literally my same job the whole time I worked there.”“We knew that any man that was doing what I was doing was going to make more than me. And that they were going to be able to negotiate higher salaries, even at lower ratings,” she said. Ms. Reid was believed to make about $3 million a year. The only male MSNBC colleague who potentially makes 10 times her salary is Joe Scarborough, who is believed to make in the $30 million a year range. (It’s not clear how his wife and co-host, Mika Brzezinski, is compensated.) If Ms. Reid is referring to the greater NBCUniversal News Group, there is also Lester Holt to factor in. He is believed to have been making about $10 million a year before his recent ouster and move to “Dateline,” which likely came with a stiff pay cut.Ms. Reid’s former compensation is believed to have been somewhat less than that of white male MSNBC hosts Ari Melber, Chris Hayes, and Lawrence O’Donnell, who are believed to make in the $4 million to $5 million range. These men are not believed to work less hard than Ms. Reid did.There is one female co-host who makes 10 times Ms. Reid’s salary for less work: Rachel Maddow was, during Ms. Reid’s tenure, making $30 million a year to work one day a week. In her remarks at the African American film festival on Martha’s Vineyard, an exclusive island that has a thriving black community in the summer, Ms. Reid also said that her non-black colleagues often benefited from the “Elon Musk presumption,” where “people are like, ‘You look like a genius, you must be a genius.’ But they’re not. They work less hours and make more than us, get bigger raises, more opportunities, and more grace. This is the world we live in.”Ayman Mohyeldin, who hosted a weekend show until it was canceled earlier this year, was believed to earn between $500,000 and $750,000 a year and has probably taken a significant pay cut. Ms. Maddow temporarily agreed to work five days a week during President Trump’s first 100 days in office. During that time, the network saw an uptick in viewership, but at the 100-day mark, she went back to her one day a week hosting gig. To fill the Tuesday through Friday time, MSNBC tapped a press secretary for President Biden, Jen Psaki, to host “The Briefing,” which is drastically underperforming Ms. Maddow’s show. From May to June, Ms. Psaki averaged 1.1 million viewers. That represents a 44 percent decrease from Ms. Maddow’s 1.8 million average viewers between January and May. Perhaps more significantly, Ms. Psaki is underperforming Alex Wagner, the host who fronted the 9 p.m. hour Tuesday through Friday during the pre-100-days period when Ms. Maddow was once a week.In February, Ms. Maddow was mocked after she criticized her employer for firing Ms. Reid and other non-white hosts, who earned far less than she did.“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. It is not my call, and I understand that, but that’s what I think,” Ms. Maddow said.She also said it was “unnerving” that the network fired an additional “two non-white hosts.”“And that feels worse than bad, no matter who replaces them,” Ms. Maddow said. “That feels indefensible, and I do not defend it.”Ms. Maddow, who is openly gay, also publicly defended Ms. Reid in 2018 when homophobic tweets she had written earlier in her career resurfaced.During her remarks at the film festival, Ms. Reid seemed to leave out criticism of Ms Maddow’s pay package, which a media reporter, Dylan Byers, called “absurdly misaligned,” as she reserved much of her frustration for her former white, male colleagues.While Ms. Reid fumed about colleagues getting much more than her and working less, it is unclear if that was meant as a veiled shot at Ms. Maddow. In June, Ms. Reid called Ms. Maddow a “boss” and said she hopes MSNBC “treats her with the respect she deserves.”As the network’s ratings plunged and NBCUniversal announced it would spin off the struggling network, MSNBC reportedly offered several hosts pay cuts to keep their hosting gigs. MSNBC, soon to be MS Now, did not respond to the Sun’s request for comment by the time of publication.

A Fired MSNBC Star, Joy Reid, Says She Received ‘a Tenth’ the Pay of Male Colleagues Who Worked ‘Less Hours,’ Calls Herself Victim of Racism

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