People who become perceived as prima donnas often don’t do well in major companies, unless they are virtual cash cows and (virtually) irreplaceable. For instance, Fox News’ Bill O’Reilly is to Fox News what Donald Duck was to Walt Disney in the 1940s (and he often makes about as much sense). Melissa Harris-Perry has had a MSNBC weekend show that is quite thoughtful and offers a kind of serious discussion and authentic you don’t often find on other cable shows or networks. But now she has walked off her show, illustrating a truly stunning lack of understanding of how the news media works during important election news cycles — and a lack of understanding how big news corporations work. (I need to note that I worked for two big news companies when I was a fulltime reporter: for Knight Ridder’s Wichita Eagle Beacon in Kansas, and for the Copley Press’ San Diego Union in California, and in the 1970s freelanced overseas for The Christian Science Monitor, Chicago Daily News, NPR and contributed to publications such as Newsweek).

Yes, her walk could be temporary but I’m betting at some point MSNBC will officially drop her show — even if she does agree to come back. She feels burned by MSNBC; MSNBC must feel singed by her email which became public. (You can read the full letter and make your own judgment on this by GOING HERE and scrolling down.)

She decided to walk off in the worst way with a major corporation: by writing an angry email, seemingly raising the race card and then backing off. She also apparently lost sight of the act: no one (even Fox News’ Bill O’Reilly) is completely irreplaceable to a corporation, especially one that deals with information or entertainment.

I was astounded at the tone of her message to her MSNBC co-worlers and not surprised by MSNBC’s response:

In an unusually public flare-up, one of MSNBC’s television personalities clashed with the network on Friday in a dispute about airtime and editorial freedom and said she was refusing to host the show that bears her name this weekend.

The host, Melissa Harris-Perry, wrote in an email to co-workers this week that her show had effectively been taken away from her and that she felt “worthless” in the eyes of NBC News executives, who are restructuring MSNBC.

“Here is the reality: Our show was taken — without comment or discussion or notice — in the midst of an election season,” she wrote in the email, which became public on Friday. “After four years of building an audience, developing a brand and developing trust with our viewers, we were effectively and utterly silenced.”

In a phone interview, Ms. Harris-Perry confirmed she would not appear on the show this weekend. She said she had received no word about whether her show, which runs from 10 a.m. to noon on Saturdays and Sundays, had been canceled, but said she was frustrated that her time slot had faced pre-emptions for coverage of the presidential election. She said she had not appeared on the network at all “for weeks” and that she was mostly sidelined during recent election coverage in South Carolina and New Hampshire. (She was asked to return this weekend.)

HUH?????????????

It IS a major election year.

MSNBC, CNN and Fox News are locked in a major battle for ratings — which most assuredly explains why they give Donald Trump access to their networks literally whenever he wants it, via live events, even phone in interviews on major political interview shows which would have been UNTHINKABLE for serious broadcasters to agree to even 10 years ago. Trump gets ratings so he has been gifted a media advantage his competitors have not been given. Yes, Trump is a partially a creation of the media, which gifted him all kinds of free airtime they did not gift to others running against him and won’t be gifting to Bernie Sanders or Hillary Clinton.

The big story is the election and breaking events and polls and primaries and caucuses. It isn’t her show. Her show was pulled to cover breaking news in a year where politics is now to the public what pro wrestling was years ago and each network has big bucks on the line plus potential viewership increases.

Here is the most damning part of her message in referring to her bosses, which suggests her days at MSNBC may be over (perhaps CNN will offer her a home):

In her email, Ms. Harris-Perry wrote that she was not sure if the NBC News chairman, Andrew Lack, or Phil Griffin, the MSNBC president, were involved in the way her show was handled recently, but she directed blame toward both.

“I will not be used as a tool for their purposes,” she wrote. “I am not a token, mammy or little brown bobble head. I am not owned by Lack, Griffin or MSNBC. I love our show. I want it back.”

Ms. Harris-Perry is black, and Mr. Lack and Mr. Griffin are white. In the phone interview on Friday, Ms. Harris-Perry clarified her remarks and said she did not think race played a role in her recent absence from the air.

She tried to walk it back, but suggesting that her corporation considers her a “mammy or little brown bobble head” is mind boggling and not easy to take back. Or possible.

If Chris Matthews was pre-empted would it be because MSNBC considered him a leprechaun?

You can tell those were unwise words, since she has tried to walk it back:

“I don’t know if there is a personal racial component,” she said. “I don’t think anyone is doing something mean to me because I’m a black person.”

But that’s not what the email suggested.

And MSNBC’s statement made it clear that her show was not on due to breaking political events and that they didn’t appreciate her comments. This is not a statement issued by happy bosses:

An NBC News spokesman said in a statement, “In this exciting and unpredictable presidential primary season, many of our daytime programs have been temporarily upended by breaking political coverage, including M.H.P. This reaction is really surprising, confusing and disappointing.”

MORE:

Ms. Harris-Perry, who is also a professor at Wake Forest University, has hosted her MSNBC show since 2012. She has used the show to explore issues like social justice and racism, and diversity has been the centerpiece of the show since its start.

“I care only about substantive, meaningful and autonomous work,” she wrote in her email. “When we can do that, I will return — not a moment earlier.”

Can dictating to the network work?

Stranger things have happened, but it’s unlikely.

In not showing up and writing an email that made its way into the mainstream media basically accusing the network of not appreciating her and being run by racists, it’s likely that she has lost her show in the long term and perhaps short term. She took the MSNBC show off her Twitter bio which means she doesn’t intend to come back or as a means of leverage against MSNBC to give her what she wants.

Meanwhile, as thoughtful as her show has been, her email has given ammunition to conservatives and Fox News fans who hate MSNBC and have a nonstop mantra about it being a network of unabashed literals (when MSNBC as well just like Fox News also has excellent news staff on breaking stories. Fox News isn’t only the tiresome and predictable partisan hack known as Sean “Rip-N-Read-Republican-Talking-Points” Hannity.)

If she doesn’t go back to her show, one certainty will be seen immediately: the corporation will go on without her and eventually find a replacement to fill the slot who can get the same amount of ratings but might be more understanding to how the news media works during an election cycle that isn’t only competitive in terms of political parties, but on the news networks fronts.

James Joyner:

I’ve only seen her show once or twice and only because Dan Drezner was on. It’s apparently aimed at politics nerds, a niche I fit into. But the bottom line is that MSNBC has always struggled for an identity and has never been able to leverage the seemingly huge advantage of NBC’s news team to be more competitive in the cable news industry.
Perry was hired under a different regime which had a very different branding scheme. The notion that it is a “betrayal” for her new bosses to preempt a marginally popular show to cover the presidential campaign—always the bread and butter of cable news programming—or that she is entitled to “autonomy” in what she talks about on their air is laughable. MSNBC isn’t her classroom and she’s not entitled to academic freedom on their time. When Fox and CNN are covering the political horse race during probably the most contentious and surprising presidential contest in my lifetime, all but her most dedicated viewers are going to be changing channels when she’s talking about the sociological implications of Beyoncé videos.
I’m more than a little sympathetic to Perry’s desire for smarter discourse on cable news. There’s only so much that one can say about the political horse race. Bringing in more scholars with substantive knowledge and more voices that aren’t coming from white, Ivy League graduates is a huge plus. But television is a bottom-line business and she has to deliver viewership. If she were winning her time slot, you’d better believe MSNBC would be using her more, not less.

Tweets are overwhelmingly supporting her. A sampling:

JOE GANDELMAN, Editor-In-Chief

Joe Gandelman is a former fulltime journalist who freelanced in India, Spain, Bangladesh and Cypress writing for publications such as the Christian Science Monitor and Newsweek. He also did radio reports from Madrid for NPR’s All Things Considered. He has worked on two U.S. newspapers and quit the news biz in 1990 to go into entertainment. He also has written for The Week and several online publications, did a column for Cagle Cartoons Syndicate and has appeared on CNN.

themoderatevoice.com/