MSNBC Producer Quits, Calls Network a ‘Cancer’ Stoking ‘National Division’

An MSNBC television producer says she quit her job in late July to escape a network news cycle that is a “cancer” amplifying fringe voices and causing “national division.”  

Ariana Pekary was a producer at MSNBC and a key member of the team for The Last Word with Lawrence O’Donnell. Formerly, she worked at NPR.

But her last day at MSNBC was July 24, she wrote on her blog. 

“I don’t know what I’m going to do next exactly but I simply couldn’t stay there anymore,” she wrote. “My colleagues are very smart people with good intentions. The problem is the job itself. It forces skilled journalists to make bad decisions on a daily basis.” 

Industry leaders, she said, “will admit” behind closed doors “the damage that’s being done” to the country and to the news industry. 

“We are a cancer and there is no cure,” she said a “successful and insightful TV veteran” once told her.

The “cancer,” Pekary said, impacts all Americans, even if they don’t watch MSNBC.  

“This cancer stokes national division, even in the middle of a civil rights crisis,” Pekary wrote. “The model blocks diversity of thought and content because the networks have incentive to amplify fringe voices and events, at the expense of others … all because it pumps up the ratings.

“This cancer risks human lives, even in the middle of a pandemic. The primary focus quickly became…