The Mayor of Weekends at MS NOW is entering the final days of her term. No one elected Alex Witt to public office, but the MS NOW (and MSNBC) veteran has quietly held court on camera on Saturday and Sunday afternoons — in various permutations and formats — for more than two decades. When colleague Alicia Melendez first came to the cable-news outlet, now part of Versant Media, she anchored a weekend slot and turned to Witt — to whom she gave the ersatz title — for advice, like how to get the makeup she wanted.
Witt was able to leverage her Saturday and Sunday experience to help. After joining MSNBC in 1999, she will anchor her last program on September 6 — this Saturday — then fill in on various daytime hours through the rest of the year. Ask the average MS NOW viewer which anchors work there, and chances are they’ll talk about Rachel Maddow, Lawrence O’Donnell or Ari Melber.
But Alex Witt, by dint of her longevity and her hunker-down-and-do-it style, is right up there, even if weekends aren’t seen as the glitziest time on the schedule. And yet, viewers tend to watch on weekends with fewer distractions and for longer periods of time. Director Aaron Sorkin would watch Witt regularly and email her for months before asking her to work as a consultant on his HBO series, “The Newsroom.” Actor Rami Malek once ran up to her at a festival to tell her he was an avid viewer.
Witt was anchoring on a weekend when the U.S. ousted Venezuelan leader Nicolás Maduro from power earlier this year, and when Saddam Hussein in 2002 submitted an official declaration that Iraq had no weapons of mass destruction. Over the years, says Witt, “there has been a lot on weekends.” Her looming departure may be one of the last of its kind. Few people stick with cable news jobs for such a long period of time, and, as the economics of the business change, fewer still may be able to do so.
At MS NOW, only correspondent Chris Jansing comes close to matching Witt’s staying power. At Fox News Channel, veteran Neal Cavuto is gone, with Sean Hannity, Brian Kilmeade and Steve Doocy among those who have stayed on the schedule since the network’s early years. Wolf Blitzer, Christiane Amanpour and Anderson Cooper are among the stalwarts at CNN.
Now there are fewer journalists with such a pedigree, and their number is likely to winnow further. Younger journalists have “all the different, shiny new objects and things” to ply their craft in new venues, says Witt, and the days of working for a single company for an entire career are largely gone. Will others match her durability in years to come?
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