During this weekend’s “Saturday Night Live” Weekend Update, co-anchor Michael Che pointed out an uncomfortable truth: NBCUniversal is losing two prominent Black news anchors at the same time.
MSNBC anchor Joy Reid, who previously filled the 7 p.m. slot, has been let go as part of a massive reshuffling of talent at the news cabler. And NBC Nightly News anchor Lester Holt announced this week that he was departing after a decade in the chair.
That, of course, led Che to quip that perhaps he’s the next to go.
“This week, MSNBC fired its only non-white primetime host, and Lester Holt announced he is stepping down as the anchor of NBC Nightly News,” Che said. “Well, NBC, only one more to go, baby,” he added, as he pointed to a photo of himself.
Che has co-anchored “SNL‘s” Weekend Update with Colin Jost since 2014, having replaced Cecily Strong in the role. (Che and Jost had served as co-head writers at SNL from 2017 until 2022.)
The departures of Reid and Holt have come from very different corners: Holt announced his own departure this week in a memo to staff: “After 10 years, 17 if you include my years on the weekends, the time has come for me to step away from my role as anchor of ‘Nightly News.’ It has truly been the honor of a lifetime to work with each of you every day, keeping journalism as our true north and our viewers at the center of everything we do,” Holt wrote. He simultaneously announced that he would remain at NBC News 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 come with much more controversy. That included criticism from inside MSNBC, where star host Rachel Maddow blasted her employer for letting Reid go. “Joy Reid’s show, ‘The ReidOut,’ ended tonight. And Joy is not taking a different job in the network. She is leaving the network altogether and that is very, very, very hard to take,” Maddow said on Feb. 24. “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.”
