October—December
- After 16 years as part of MSNBC’s weekday lineup Andrea Mitchell announced her departure from her eponymous newscast—but crucially not the network—in late October. Instead, like O’Donnell at CBS, the veteran reporter will segue into a new role at NBC News and MSNBC, covering stories “from a different vantage point” as she said on the air.
- Three years after exiting 30 Rock, Brian Williams got back into the news game with an Election Night special on Amazon Prime Video, which also featured a number of familiar former correspondents from legacy media outlets. Streaming live from 5 p.m. into late night hours, the event was Amazon’s first taste of news programming and other networks—not to mention other journalists—are sure to be closely monitoring whether they go back for seconds.
- Kicking off a wave of post-election departures, CNN bid farewell to Chris Wallace, who told The Daily Beast that he’d be pursuing opportunities in the streaming and podcast space. Wallace exited ahead of anticipated layoffs at CNN in early 2025.
- Fox News talent largely stayed in place for much of the year, but that changed following Trump’s return to the White House. Fox & Friends Weekend co-host Pete Hegseth was the first to get called up to the government ranks when the president-elect nominated him as defense secretary. Trump has since sought to hire 12 Fox personalities, including Sean Duffy and Monica Crowley. Also exiting—but not to the White House—was longtime anchor Neil Cavuto, who decided to step away following a 28-year run at Fox News Media.
- The biggest industry shake-up was saved for the final weeks of 2024 when NBCUniversal News Group announced that MSNBC and CNBC would be spun off into the appropriately named new cable venture, SpinCo. Weeks later, Warner Bros. Discovery reassigned CNN to its newly-created Global Linear Networks division that house’s the company’s declining cable assets. Both moves were interpreted as signals that CNN and MSNBC—which have struggled in the ratings following the election—could look very different at this same time next year.
