MSNBC President Weighs Exit After Trump Sworn in

MSNBC President Rashida Jones is considering leaving the network after Donald Trump is inaugurated, as ratings have continued to crash, according to Oliver Darcy’s Status newsletter and CNN’s Brian Stelter.

A spokesperson for Jones denied the report, and NBC declined to comment, the New York Post reports.

President of the left-leaning channel since 2021, Jones became the first Black woman to head a major national news network.

“It’s amazing how people want to ‘spend more time with their families’ or ‘look for new challenges’ when the ratings crash,” a television executive commented to the Post.

It’s obvious that Jones, and several other high-level anchors who are departing CNN and CBS, are all leaving on their own — as viewership craters, their multi-million-dollar salaries get slashed, and they see the writing clearly on the wall, the TV exec said.

CNN anchor Chris Wallace recently announced he was leaving the network to do podcasts, but only after he was told his massive salary would be reduced because his two shows were rating poorly, Puck News reported.

Norah O’Donnell announced in July that she would be leaving her CBS anchor chair, also after ratings continued to fall and her salary was substantially cut.

Since Election Day, MSNBC has gotten an average of 497,000 daily viewers, a 47% decline, according to Nielsen data. In advertisers’ coveted ages 25-54 demographic, MSNBC has attracted a mere 49,000 viewers.

MSNBC also suffered a ratings deterioration after Trump won the White House in 2016, and again after President Joe Biden’s catastrophic debate performance in June.

The future of MSBNC is currently up in the air, since its parent company Comcast announced in October it is considering spinning off that network along with CNBC, Bravo, E!, Syfy, USA Network, and Oxygen True Crime into a new, shareholder-owned company that it hopes will be better capitalized and better positioned to compete with streaming services.