Let us stipulate that anyone who makes a career in the electric television industry has a few synapses past the sell-by date. Sooner or later, the crazy people in charge will come for you. My advice? Make your pile and get out before they do. Otherwise the odds that things will end badly for you approximate those of your surviving crossing the Mojave Desert on roller skates in a wet suit.

Even accepting all of that as axiomatic, what has happened at MSNBC in the past several days is such an orgy of bad faith and bad ideas that it may be an industry record in that regard. Joy Reid? Gone. Jonathan Capehart? Lost his show. Alex Wagner? Lost her show and demoted. Ayman Mohyeldin? Lost his show. (Apparently, the plan is to give Capehart and Mohyeldin their own new show. I’ll believe that right about when this alleged new show hits its first commercial break.) Hell, this is still the network that 86’d Melissa Harris-Perry and Tiffany Cross and the invaluable Mehdi Hasan in the dim and distant past. And it happened just as Lester Holt announced he was bailing as anchor of NBC Nightly News. NBC News and MSNBC are starting to look like Mississippi after the federal troops left in 1877. Let’s go now to correspondent James Crow live from the White House.

Reid’s dismissal was the earthquake. Its ratings were more than solid, as though ratings for political yak shows even matter. I am something of a special pleader in this regard. Time was when I was a semi-regular guest of Reid’s, both on her nightly show and on the weekend show that came before it. Moreover, I count her as a friend. Her great gift on TV, besides her sense of humor—and she is as funny as whistling fish—was her uncompromising insistence that race is marbled throughout every major issue in American politics, as well as her ability to find voices that might otherwise never be heard on television. There is nothing more important in TV news than that, especially with the ongoing march to marginalization that is happening in this country generally.

I confess I made a conscious decision not to watch any pundit shows on the morning after Election Day last November. There are always sports, or Turner Classic Movies, or some police procedural that can serve as wallpaper if I need it to do so. The whole cable-news genre seems so completely useless in the face of what’s actually happening that it seems the equivalent of covering World War II through what was happening on Jack Benny’s radio show. But the fact remains that Joy Reid is very, very good at hosting a political television show and that dumping her in such an unceremonial fashion is bad business. It’s even bad television business, and that’s unimaginable.