Breaking: MSNBC and Greta Van Susteren Agree to Part Ways
Greta van Susteren premiered her MSNBC show in Washington, D.C. on January 9, 2017.
From MSNBC/Getty Images.
“Remember me?” Greta Van Susteren crooned to the camera as she raised the curtain on her new MSNBC show on January 9. “I’m baaack.”
It was the veteran anchor’s debut on the left-leaning cable network. She’d been off the air for four months, after 14 years at Fox News. Her tenure at the conservative bastion had abruptly ended in September amid a contract dispute spurred by the exit of longtime network kingpin Roger Ailes, which left the newsroom unsettled. Van Susteren had been among the handful of Fox news hosts who publicly defended Ailes against allegations of sexual harassment but later expressed regret for doubting his accusers. Immediately after she announced she would not return to her 7 P.M. show, On the Record, she posted on Facebook that Fox “has not felt like home to me for a few years,” but that she hoped “to continue my career in broadcasting.”
Months later, she found a new home for her show For the Record, at 6 P.M. on MSNBC. The announcement came two days after NBC picked up Fox News’s brightest star, Megyn Kelly, to host a daily morning show and Sunday evening magazine program. Both moves to raid a conservative rival’s talent pool, just weeks before the country would inaugurate a Republican president, raised eyebrows. Some media critics were confused by what appeared to be a deliberate shift rightward by NBC leadership at a time when the network’s audience was suddenly agitating for a louder, prouder brand of liberalism.
WATCH: The Future of Conservative News
“Yes, I’m back. Why? Well, several reasons,” was how Van Susteren ended her first broadcast. “In part, unfinished business. I hate unfinished business.”
But a few days shy of her six-month mark on air, Van Susteren’s business is finished on MSNBC, according to people familiar with the situation. The anchor, whose show struggled to gain traction even as the rest of her colleagues were buoyed by anti-Trump hysteria, has parted ways with the network. She will not appear on the show on Thursday evening. She will be permanently replaced by Ari Melber, the network’s chief legal correspondent and host of the The Point on weekends. He will continue to appear across NBC and MSNBC shows as he takes over the 6 P.M. slot next month. (MSNBC and NBC News declined to comment. Reached by phone Thursday afternoon, Van Susteren had no comment.)
The decision comes as much of the rest of MSNBC has been enjoying a ratings resurgence, and, in some cases, dominance over Fox News. For the first time in 17 years, the network beat both Fox News and CNN in prime-time viewership on weeknights in May among the crucial 25-to-54 age demographic—a giant 118 percent leap from a year earlier. In the full second quarter, according to ratings released by Nielsen earlier this week, the network came in second behind Fox for total day viewers, but its growth from a year earlier outpaced both its rivals. Much of this growth is due to prime-time anchors like Rachel Maddow and Lawrence O’Donnell, whose nightly newscasts have tapped into a potent mix of liberal anxiety and schadenfreude over the Trump presidency. In the second quarter, Maddow’s show won the demo in prime-time, though Fox’s Tucker Carlson had the highest number of total viewers. Van Susteren’s show, however, fell behind its rivals in the 6 P.M. hour.
Last month, in a New York Times profile about the network’s ascendancy in the age of Trump, NBC News chairman Andrew Lack seemed to hint that there was trouble brewing for the show. “It’s not breaking out,” he said. “Everybody wants every new show to break out Day 1. I think it takes time. He added: “I’ve got a lot of patience.”
That patience ran out, however, at the same time as Lack and executives at NBC had been putting out fires with Van Susteren’s former Fox News colleague Megyn Kelly, who has hit repeated bumps in the road since her Sunday evening show premiered earlier this month. The network has had success with other conservatives, including Joe Scarborough on Morning Joe and with the recent premier of Nicolle Wallace at 4 P.M. But Van Susteren's slightly wonky right-centrism didn’t catch. It is unclear whether she made sense outside of Fox News in 2017, and whether a star at that network can shine anywhere other than the very particular universe that Roger Ailes and Rupert Murdoch created. For now, NBC is still betting that Kelly's star will. Her morning show is set to debut in September.
