Tiffany Cross, Angela Rye and Andrew Gillum teamed up on a new podcast, “Native Land Pod,” and they’re spilling all of the tea. During a “testimony” segment on the latest episode of the show, Cross shared the story of her split from MSNBC — and she didn’t hold anything back.
“I was never given an official reason for why they canceled my show,” said the former host of “The Cross Connection,” “but it was pretty obvious that I had drawn the ire of white conservatives.”
As Cross told it, her time at the network was rocky before she was even officially named as an anchor. She said that, after a segment on “Morning Joe” in which she challenged host Joe Scarborough about the history of racism in the Republican Party, he purportedly ran to executives to try to block her from getting hired to replace Joy Reid’s hour.
“There’s an unspoken rule that you’re not supposed to disagree with Joe, and I didn’t get that memo,” says Cross, recounting the encounter.
“I was told by several reputable sources, including a talent agent, two anchors, and another executive at the network, that he left set and went into...the president of the network’s office to complain about my segment, to complain that I disagreed with him, said that I called him racist and suggested that I should not be Joy Reid’s successor to get the show,” said Cross, adding that NBC Universal Chairman Cesar Conde hired her anyway.
But she says things only got worse. “Every single week from the start of my show to the very last show I did, it was a battle. It was a battle to cover things that I wanted to talk about,” she said, adding. “When I would fight these battles, I know y’all know exactly what I mean; I was spoken to in the most condescending ways.”
Cross, who has decades of experience, said that she would regularly have people tell her the definition of news. “I had my intelligence questioned,” she said.
MSNBC did not respond to a request for comment by the time of publication.
The former Cross Connection host also said that she was held to a different standard than her white colleagues despite what she said were consistently high ratings.
“[Joe Scarborough] was allowed to say what he wanted to say as were other white men on the network,” she said, “I had my script scrutinized because they didn’t want me saying anything that sounded like an insult...it was exhausting.”
Cross said things really started to go downhill at MSNBC once she got on the radar of right-wing commentators, including Tucker Carlson, who used the top of his show to accuse her of trying to start a race war.
“After this the network did not issue a statement the way they had for some of my white colleagues who had also been targeted by MAGA extremists,” said Cross. “Instead executives spoke to me and instructed me that I could not respond to Tucker Carlson at all, and then they began to scrutinize my show every little thing I wrote.”
Cross later appeared on Charlemagne Tha God’s show, where she said Florida was the “dick” of the country and called Ron DeSantis “Ron DeStupid.”
“After that show...I got a call from the president of the network saying that they would not be renewing my contract, which was up in a month, and that my viewers would not even be given the courtesy or the respect of me being able to sign off or have a final show,” said Cross.
Cross said that the way she was let go impacted her professionally on a deeper-scale. “When that happens, it suggests to other people in the industry that this person is so unhireable that we could not trust her with a live mic,” she said.
“So it was all very intentional. The firing was abrupt and it was also very intentional to my audience to my viewers, that you are not the kind of viewers that the company cares about. I was devastated.”
Cross said she doesn’t regret fighting with the network. “For me, what was the point in having this platform if I’m going to show up and spit out some vanilla granola boringness and hope that one day the white man lets me host the Today show,” she said.