The indispensable weekly dispatch Wednesday night from Puck’s Dylan Byers dove into the fallout from MSNBC’s axing of Joy Reid (and demotions of Jonathan Capehart, Ayman Moyheldin, and Kate Phang) with MSNBC staff reportedly uneasy with longtime host Rachel Maddow’s latest public blasting of her bosses.

While her public criticisms were supported in the past (and we’ll get to those later), Byers wrote this defense of Reid seemed out-of-touch.

“This time around, however, the response inside the network to Maddow’s chest-thumping was more skeptical...After all, her critique of the network glossed over a few important details that did not go unnoticed by her colleagues, including several other anchor,” Byers said, putting it mildly before tearing into her factual inaccuracies.

Earlier, he noted she’d “soon be ending her 100-day run as a five-night-a-week anchor and returning to her famously plum $25 million-a-year, Mondays-only gig” and that the other half of her hissy fit was that hard-working producers (“roughly 125 production staffers”) were being let go (yet free to reapply for 110 spots).

Byers did the math on how much 125 behind-the-camera staffers cost and, would you believe it, it equals her salary. On top of that, he delivered a zinger about Maddow seemingly viewing cable newsrooms as “Montessori schools” in an era with cable writ large hemorrhaging dough and thus life “gets real” (click “expand”):

Several of Maddow’s colleagues also noted the peculiarity of the star anchor’s cri de coeur on behalf of the 30 Rock proletariat...Maddow seemed to miss an obvious irony of her critique: She gets paid $25 million a year to effectively work one day a week, an absurdly misaligned salary that allows her to comfortably shuttle between her Manhattan apartment and pre-Civil War farmhouse retreat in the Berkshires, but puts a financial burden on MSNBC to stringently manage the unit economics of every other hour in primetime. Put another way, her annual salary is roughly equivalent to the combined salary of about—go figure—125 production staffers.

(....)

Maddow may have a point about “treating people well” and “having their back,” but terminally declining industries aren’t Montessori schools—shit gets real. In the increasingly ruthless world of cable news, anchors who don’t rate won’t be sent off to sinecures; budgets will continue to dwindle; other apparent indignities will present themselves, just as they once did in book publishing or the record industry. Where will anchors and producers go for a drink after their shows… in Stamford? If she’s this fired up about Joy Reid, she might not be able to stay here forever.

Along with her hypocrisy on cash flow, Byers noticed Maddow bemoaned the programming changes as “worse than bad, no matter who replaces them,” thus ignoring Reid’s replacements Alicia Menendez, Symone Sanders-Townsend, and Michael Steele:

Reid was being replaced at 7 p.m. by another Black woman (Symone), a Black man (Steele), and the first Latina woman (Menendez) to host an MSNBC primetime show in the network’s history. Not to put too fine a point on it, but the “two, count ’em two, nonwhite hosts” were actually being replaced by three—count ’em three—nonwhite hosts...[W]as it really “indefensible” to make space for three anchors of color whose chemistry might conceivably enhance the network’s popularity at a time when its ratings have been in the gutter?

She also omitted the reality MSNBC had cut Reid as she “simply didn’t rate, and she had also become emblematic of the worst instincts of partisan punditry, building up a formidable sizzle reel of anti-conservative attacks in which she sometimes portrayed all Republicans as racists[.]”

Byers noted these piercing jabs at unnamed bosses (including new MSNBC head Rebecca Kutler) may have left “the hundreds of thousands of elderly loyal viewers” with “no earthly idea what the [expletive] their favorite political commentator was talking about,” this was similar to the hissy fit she threw last year when NBC briefly hired former Republican National Committee Chairwoman Ronna McDaniel as a political analyst.

He hilariously dubbed this as having “catalyz[ed] a stupid daylong, Dead Poets Society-style desk-jumping cascade in which nearly every MSNBC anchor took a turn dunking on the suits at 30 Rock.”

We would add a slight fact-check that this was actually at least the fourth time she put her bosses on notice as, back in February and June 2015, she weighed on how MSNBC/NBC treated her buddy, Lyin’ Brian Williams.

Byers asked the key question concerning the reality MSNBC and six other networks will have to financially stand on its own as a new company without Comcast: “[H]ow valuable is a talent who now brings in only 2 million viewers for one hour a week, and reserves the right to occasionally fly off the handle and nuke her bosses?”