Former MSNBC host says she was fired because she didn’t ‘play ball’

Newsmax host Greta Van Susteren claimed Monday that MSNBC tried to tell her “what to do” regarding her reporting when she joined the network during a conversation with journalist Tara Palmeri.

The left-leaning corporate network announced Feb. 23 that shows hosted by Joy Reid and Alex Wagner, as well as weekend shows hosted by Katie Phang, Jonathan Capehart and Ayman Mohyeldin, would be canceled as part of an effort to re-tool its lineup. Van Susteren, a former legal analyst who also hosted shows on Fox News and CNN, said the contrast became apparent early on.

“All I knew was the one narrow niche, which was English. You know, I have no idea what anyone else was saying. Nobody told me what to say or do while I was there. Nobody told me what to say or do at CNN, Fox — ” Van Susteren said before Palmeri broke out laughing. “They wouldn’t dare! Come on, Greta. They wouldn’t dare with you.”

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“Well, no, but that’s why I got fired at MSNBC,” Van Susteren responded, with Palmeri continuing to laugh while saying, “I forgot to mention MSNBC.”

Van Susteren was a legal analyst on CNN from 1991 to 2002, when she went to Fox News, where she worked until resigning in 2016, later joining MSNBC, where she hosted a show for roughly six months in 2017 before departing. Van Susteren joined Newsmax in 2022 after working with Voice of America (VOA) and Gray Television.

“They told me, after I had been at CNN and Fox .. MSNBC tried to tell me what to do, I almost thought they were joking because I had, like, a 15- or 18-year career in the news business and nobody ever told me and so it never occurred to me,” Van Sustern responded. “So that’s why I got fired at MSNBC — because they said I needed to play ball, and I thought — you know, that didn’t work.”

Comcast announced plans to spin off MSNBC, CNBC, USA, E!, Oxygen, SyFy and other channels in the news and entertainment genres in November, after MSNBC ratings fell by just over 50% following the defeat of then-Vice President Kamala Harris in the 2024 election.

MSNBC guests routinely hyped the claims that Trump’s 2016 campaign colluded with the Russian government to defeat former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and repeatedly had then-Democratic Rep. Adam Schiff of California, who often made claims about alleged collusion between the 2016 Trump campaign and Russia, on the air, which were later disproven.

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