What the future will look like at MSNBC became even hazier Tuesday as veteran anchor Brian Williams, a fixture of the NBCU family for nearly three decades, announced his impending departure. Williams, 62, “has informed us he would like to take the coming months to spend time with his family” and will “be signing off from The 11th Hour at the end of the year,” MSNBC president Rashida Jones said in a memo Tuesday night. Williams “left of his own accord,” according to Variety, and “is not looking to take a new daily anchor job at a competitor.” But in a statement to colleagues on Tuesday, Williams, 62, suggested he’s not hanging up his boots just yet. “This is the end of a chapter and the beginning of another,” he said, adding “there are many things I want to do, and I’ll pop up again somewhere.”
The departure caps a 28-year stretch during which Williams famously fell from grace and, in an unlikely but well-executed return, managed to resuscitate not only his image but the 11 p.m. MSNBC hour to which he was reassigned. The cable star had been at the helm of NBC Nightly News for a decade when, in 2015, he was found to have exaggerated some accounts from reporting assignments; NBCU suspended Williams, the face of the network, for six months and replaced him with Lester Holt. He returned in 2016, at the height of the presidential election, with The 11th Hour, a program that “didn’t rely on talking heads or bickering partisans, but rather beat reporters, attorneys and inside-the-Beltway habitués who knew the ins and outs of the topics they were discussing,” Variety notes. Williams’ second act in May 2017 gave MSNBC “its first outright win in the 11 p.m. time slot since 2001,” the New York Times reports, as 11th Hour surpassed the ratings of its competitors at CNN and Fox News and ultimately prompted such rivals to rethink their own 11 p.m. programming. Fox News’s Gutfeld!, which launched earlier this year at 11 p.m., now tops cable news at that hour.
The news comes on the heels of reported weeks of negotiations about his contract, which according to Insider was set to expire in December. Williams now passing on management’s offer of a new contract exacerbates the “talent problem” plaguing MSNBC, CNN’s Brian Stelter writes, concerns that have largely centered around top-rated host Rachel Maddow. In August, network executives breathed a sigh of relief after managing to keep Maddow, who was reportedly considering exiting, with a multi-year contract that offered an expanded portfolio. But Maddow in her new role is expected to forgo her daily 9 p.m. slot for more of a weekly format “in the first half of 2022, although management is holding out hope she will stay longer as she has no apparent successor,” according to the Los Angeles Times, noting on Tuesday that Williams’ exit means Jones and NBCU News Group Chairman Cesar Conde now “have to contend with filling two anchor chairs as cable news audiences continue to shrink in the post-Trump era.”
Stelter—whose “half-educated guess is that Ali Velshi will wind up” replacing Williams—points out that MSNBC has also lost other employees in recent months, such as Capitol Hill correspondent Kasie Hunt, whom CNN poached for its streaming bid CNN+ in July. (Jenn Suozzo, who departed as executive producer of NBC Nightly News in August, is also among the executives joining CNN+). Plus, Insider reports that "Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski have also been holding conversations about what's next for them.”
This article was updated to reflect Fox News’s current 11 p.m. programming and ratings.
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