One does understand the fact that, now that it’s no longer part of the NBC News umbrella, MS NOW can’t afford the extravagances it once could. The media landscape is a hard place, after all, and losing your corporate sugar daddy — combined with their access to news stories — means a bit more belt-tightening is still in order.
However, when the network is basically admitting that it doesn’t have Alex Witt money to throw around and that they might just start airing podcasts on the weekend, things are dire indeed.
According to Variety, MS NOW will be parting ways with its longest-tenured host, Witt, who has been with the channel since 1999 — back when both of its original corporate partners, Microsoft and NBC, were still on board — and has been hosting on weekends since 2011.
Kudos to @AlexWitt for her amazing work at MS Now since 1999. She will be greatly missed as a weekend news anchor. I look forward to where she heads next.
Alex is the best of the best.
Always calm
Always sharp questions
Always breaking down what big news events mean for regular… pic.twitter.com/VGCnlODobo— Heather Long (@byHeatherLong) June 29, 2026
The move comes, Variety reported, as the network “will move away from featuring live, hosted hours after 6 p.m. on weekends and instead fill its schedule largely with taped video podcasts, expanding its use of a popular Saturday-night program from Crooked Media as well as podcasts hosted by MS NOW mainstays Nicolle Wallace and Chris Hayes.”
Witt’s departure was sold as a mutual decision, although these things almost always are, and her show — now called “The Weekend: Primetime” — will be canceled. While live coverage will be maintained in the 1 p.m. to 4 p.m. time slot that Witt held by another MS NOW talking head, Antonia Hylton, all I can say is that I hope she has experience in podcasting.
Will MSNOW even exist in five years?
From Variety’s report, where MS NOW president Rebecca Kutler attempts to make this sound like this is just a mutual parting of ways:
When Witt departs, she will take with her one of MS NOW’s last ties to its early history, when it was known as MSNBC and was a joint venture of NBC News and Microsoft. Witt’s long tenure on weekends, according to one person familiar with the network, comes from a simple achievement: Nothing else MSNBC or MS NOW put on the schedule drew bigger or more reliable numbers than her. After her departure, only Chris Jansing, the veteran anchor who continues to work for MS NOW as a correspondent, will offer similar connections to the past.
Witt “has been a continued, trusted, and steady presence for our audiences,” Kutler said in her memo, noting coverage of the 2003 Space Shuttle Columbia disaster and Ground Zero reportage following the terrorist attacks of 9/11, among other events. “We thank Alex for her endless contributions to the network and will have more opportunities to celebrate her in the coming months.”
I was reminded, when reading those words — and probably for the only time regarding anything MS NOW-related — of an anecdote from the memoir of the late Anglo-American pundit and controversialist Christopher Hitchens, where he talked about how he held his first job in media until his “editor said something to me that made it impossible to go on working for him.”
The fuller story was fleshed out in a footnote: “’You’re fired’ were the exact words, as I remember them,” Hitchens wrote.
Had that gig been on the weekend desk at MS NOW, those words would have doubtlessly been, “We thank Christopher for his endless contributions to the network and will have more opportunities to celebrate him in the coming months just as soon as he sleeps off this hangover.”
Anyhow, having fun with MS NOW for its failures to score a few laughs for its partisan failures does feel a bit supererogatory — until you realize that that’s pretty much been MS NOW/MSNBC’s thing since it reinvented itself as the official network of the progressive left.
Two long decades ago, it abandoned all pretense by going all in on hosts like Keith Olbermann and Rachel Maddow, who dumbed down every major political issue to the point where Republicans and mere liberal Democrats were all a bunch of stupidheads and haha, what a bunch of losers, aren’t we so much smarter?
Olbermann is no longer at the network, but not because his schtick didn’t work with MSNBC’s audience; his firing, as it has been at every outlet unfortunate enough to employ him, had to do with personality issues that beg for some mental health professional to finally make differential diagnosis from the wide swath of the DSM-5 that could potentially cover the former “SportsCenter” anchor’s employment and/or other personal issues. Maddow’s still there, and still trying to milk the lulz from the same old formula.
This is essentially “The Daily Show” model of journalism, but on a channel masquerading as actual journalism. And it worked, until it didn’t, which is part of the reason why the channel is now an independent entity.
The problem is that the demographic uniquely uninformed enough to think this is a model of straight journalism now doesn’t consume news this way. Again from Variety:
Younger audiences, in particular, find podcast hosts and digital influencers to be more authentic than traditional TV personnel, and help them understand issues with more depth, according to data from Pew Research. The organization found in 2025 that about 21% of U.S. adults get news from news influencers on social media, with 38% of those between the ages of 18 to 29 doing so regularly — compared with just 8% of adults 65 or older. Licensing podcasts from a third party or making use of podcasts already being created by current staff can also serve to keep costs down.
The conclusion? “Hey, the kids aren’t buying this junk anymore. They like Joe Rogan and the Crooked Media pod bros instead. Why don’t we just put podcasts on air instead of real news?”
That’ll work great. What could possibly go wrong taking a format where part of the attraction is the fact that it’s an on-demand product and putting it on air at a fixed time? The people who can’t afford Alex Witt money anymore certainly think this is a great idea, and clearly they’ve got it all under control. Say, I hear Keith Olbermann hosts one of them there podcasts, too! Lose one connection to the past, get one back in return? I wouldn’t count on it — not because of those employability issues, but because even ol’ Keith knows watching MS NOW is like watching a cancer patient who knows he’s not going to make it.
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