Harris-Perry Twitter Fury: MSNBC Has Race-Based 'Culture of Fear'

Tim Graham
March 2nd, 2016 11:39 AM
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Brian Flood of The Wrap boasted “We might have found the Kanye West of cable news.” MSNBC doesn't care about black people??

He was referring to fired MSNBC weekend host Melissa Harris-Perry unleashing a series of tweets on Tuesday bashing MSNBC boss Phil Griffin, touting her own show’s record of racial and gender diversity, and apologizing to former minority colleagues Toure, Karen Finney, and Martin Bashir  for not resisting the network’s “culture of fear.”

Harris-Perry didn't just bash Griffin, but MSNBC senior vice president Yvette Miley, a black woman, accusing them of leaking her email that said she wasn't a "mammy" or a "little brown bobble head."

That tweet was about Harris-Perry refusing to sign a "non-disparagement clause. As CNN's Brian Stelter reported:

On Tuesday, the outgoing MSNBC host said that her exit negotiations with the network fell through after she refused to accept the terms of a non-disparagement clause that she described as "a gag order."

"They wanted me to sign a non-disparagement clause, and we had a deep disagreement over what constituted the non-disparagement clause," Harris-Perry told CNNMoney on Tuesday. "They wanted me not to speak about MSNBC. I said no."

James Perry, Harris-Perry's husband and the one who led the negotiations with MSNBC, said that MSNBC's non-disparagement clause would have restricted his wife to speaking about MSNBC only when it was "positive or in her academic work."

"I'll never get another penny from MSNBC," Harris-Perry said....

"Over the past year, a lot of employees have been disappeared from MSNBC, and what we've observed is there is a clear process for how they've been disappeared: You get taken out of the system and your name as a host is taken out of it as well. And then when you communicate and ask them about it, you don't get any response," [James] Perry said. He declined to provide specific examples.

Both Harris-Perry and James Perry said that she had continuously asked MSNBC's leadership for clarity on her role with the network and received no response.

"Starting around Thanksgiving, I began asking, 'Does anybody know if the show is going to be on air in 2016?" Harris-Perry said....

Whatever the case, Harris-Perry's decision to forego an exit agreement has freed her up to speak bluntly about MSNBC and her belief that the decision to cancel her show "has strong racial implications" because it silenced a show that promoted diverse perspectives.

"They wanted us to cover politics in the narrowest sense," Harris-Perry said. "I told my team, we can't allow our own show to go off air and then provide racial cover by having me continue to host the show so people see the little black girl up there."

The fired host celebrated her own show's strengths (as she saw them), breaking out the charts to tout her own record of diversity:

Then came the braggadocio:

Earlier, in gratitude mode on Monday, Harris-Perry urged more financial support for the Left as a show of support for her efforts: