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 Menendez 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. “They’re going to hear you now,” Witt says she told her. “Just hang on.”
The Mayor is about to leave. After joining MSNBC in 1999, she will anchor her last program on September 6 — this Sunday– 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.
