Not long after Joe Biden was inaugurated as POTUS, Jen Psaki told the New York Times that her plan was to stick around as White House press secretary for “roughly” a year before moving on to other endeavors.
Her stance was slightly revised in May 2021 when she told David Axelrod (an ex-Obama senior adviser) that her tenure as spokesperson for Biden White House would come to an end around May 2022.
“I think it’s going to be time for somebody else to have this job, in a year from now or about a year from now,” she stated.
While she’s said little else of it since, as May 2022 approaches the rumor mill is swirling with speculation about what Psaki’s next possible gig will be, with Puck news outlet reporting that Psaki is being “feverishly” courted by both MSNBC and CNN – with MSNBC leaning in as they may soon need a replacement for Rachel Maddow, whose future at the network is uncertain (she’s on hiatus now working on projects with NBCUniversal), and CNN looking to fill fired anchor Chris Cuomo’s old “Prime Time” slot:
With buzz that Psaki — a rising star in the Biden administration — was on the market, CNN interim co-president Amy Entelis and CNN+ programming head Rebecca Kutler rushed to Washington DC for a “top-secret and mission-critical recruitment assignment,” Puck reported.
A week later, Cesar and Rashida Conde of NBC News made a similar journey to meet Psaki.
Why should conservatives who have an immense dislike for Psaki’s daily heaping doses of gaslighting and outright falsehoods care about this development? Because if Psaki lands at MSNBC, that could set the stage for major saltiness on the set as afternoon anchor Nicolle Wallace is said to be eyeing Maddow’s time slot – and if various media reports from back in September are accurate, Wallace has (or Had?) been viewed by higher-ups at the network as the “frontrunner” of sorts to replace Maddow should she decide to exit in April:
Now, top NBC executives told Byers, ‘Nicolle is the most obvious in-house candidate’ to replace her.
[…]
‘The idea that a former Republican operative could replace a progressive icon like Maddow will surely confound and even anger some MSNBC loyalists,’ Byers explained. ‘But from the vantage point of NBC’s C-suite, it has its logic.
‘Wallace is smart, capable, charismatic – “producible” as one former NBC executive put it,’ he wrote. ‘No one should underestimate how important that is in television, even to a network catering to liberal political sensibilities.
She’s also a bit of a fruitcake, which I hear is a prerequisite for working at MSNBC.
In any event, we’ll see what happens in the coming months concerning whether or not Psaki holds true to her (revised) word about bowing out in the spring of 2022, and beyond that, if she takes the purported MSNBC offer under serious advisement. Because few things are more entertaining in Media World than seeing the tantrums that erupt at left-wing “news” outlets when their most wild-eyed “stars” feel as though they’ve been disrespected or slighted in any way.
I have no love for Psaki, of course, but I couldn’t think of a better person on MSNBC to have Psaki upstage than Nicolle Wallace, outside of maybe Joy Reid.
Let the intrigue and high drama begin!
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