Melissa Harris-Perry on the End of Her MSNBC Show: ‘We Were Simply Disappeared’

HARRIS-PERRY: "I don’t think it’s about ratings, though. This was never said to me in any way as being primarily a ratings question. It’s really a direction question. It was a—and I want to be really clear about something: I think, in an organization built on hierarchy, that those at the top have every right to change direction. And so, one of the things that I think has gotten lost is, as though I have an argument with the directional change. Now, I do, in the sense that that isn’t the direction I wanted to go in, but that isn’t really where the—sort of where the fight broke out. I’m the leader of an organization; I’ve changed direction in my organization. The issue was that there was a directional change that was not being communicated either to me as an employee or, even more importantly, to my audience. And so, what happened was, we were simply disappeared, with no communication to the audience, and then I was going to sort of reappear as though everything was fine. That, for me, was what was unacceptable. So, the email communication that was leaked was about me explaining to my team why I was making their life harder by not coming back to host. And clearly, the portions of it that ended up in The New York Times were the most inflammatory or potentially inflammatory portions relative to race, which is the point at which I made a decision to leak the entire letter, so that people could read the entire email and make a decision on their own about what they thought I was saying, one way or another. But the issue wasn’t that MSNBC made a decision to go a new direction. That’s their right. It’s their channel. It was that they weren’t communicating it."