MS NOW's premier anti-Israel host, Ayman Mohyeldin, is now homeless—having had three shows canceled in four years—and is only appearing occasionally on MS NOW programs as a commentator. He has also significantly dialed down his attacks on Israel and is posting little on social media for his hundreds of thousands of followers.
Mohyeldin, who regularly accused Israel of genocide on MSNBC—renamed MS NOW—has appeared on MS NOW roughly 10 times in the past six weeks since the show he cohosted, The Weekend: Primetime, was axed in late June in a cost-cutting measure and replaced with reruns of liberal podcasts.
He appears now to be in limbo at MS NOW, with no new host or even correspondent role. In announcing the cancellation, MS NOW president Rebecca Kutler wrote that Mohyeldin and two of his fellow canceled Weekend cohosts would "remain with MS NOW and continue to contribute across our programming and platforms, bringing their respected reporting and distinct analysis to our audiences."
The cancellation of Weekend comes just over a year after the network canceled Ayman, Mohyeldin's solo weekend show on MSNBC, in spring 2025. A version of Ayman that ran on NBCUniversal's streaming network, Peacock, was canceled in 2022.
The cancellation of Weekend was hailed by the Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting (CAMERA), which noted on June 30 that "Israel-bashing host [Ayman Mohyeldin] has now had three programs canceled during his tenure at the network. CAMERA has extensively catalogued Mohyeldin's history of biased reporting, which includes spreading the Epstein-Mossad conspiracy theory."
Throughout his tenure at NBC News, MSNBC, and now MS NOW, Mohyeldin has peddled claims that Israel is perpetrating a "genocide" in Gaza and pushed an apocryphal narrative that Israel's true war aim is to expel Palestinians from the region. In late June, a week before the sudden cancellation of Weekend, Mohyeldin badgered John F. Kennedy's grandson, Jack Schlossberg, about why he wouldn't accuse Israel of genocide.
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Mohyeldin's coverage has earned plaudits from the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), the anti-Israel advocacy group. A CAIR official has also appeared on Mohyeldin's now-canceled show to bash Israeli "settlers" and make the distorted claim that the Jewish state had "massacred" a Palestinian American in the West Bank "with impunity."
CAMERA, by contrast, has long criticized Mohyeldin for his "consistent pattern of prioritizing advocacy over journalism." The day after Hamas's Oct. 7, 2023, attacks, Mohyeldin put the blame on Israel, saying, "What we're seeing today are very deadly consequences of failed policies." He added that "failure on the American administration's part to change course, to take a different course of action with how it deals with the Palestinians and the Israelis. Failure on Israel's part. Failure on the region's part to not be able to say this is an issue that matters."
In a December 2024 segment and column on MSNBC/MS NOW's website, Mohyeldin featured a report from the reliably anti-Israel Amnesty International purporting to document "Israel's Genocide Against Palestinians in Gaza."
"When people say that this is 'the first livestreamed genocide in history,' it's not just Palestinians filming their own destruction for the world to witness, it's Israeli soldiers doing so as well," he wrote.
"All Trump did was basically acknowledge that this was the plan all along," Mohyeldin said during a February 2025 segment on the Trump administration's Gaza peace plan. "He did it with an international fugitive wanted for war crimes [Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu] smiling aside him, sitting right next to him and confirming it." Mohyeldin made no mention of Hamas's atrocities against Israelis.
Over the last six weeks since his third show was canceled—during his infrequent MS NOW appearances—Mohyeldin has claimed that the U.S. military's "fear factor has been broken" by Iran, lambasted the "deafening silence" from Republicans about President Donald Trump's recent settlement with the IRS, and decried Trump's tenure as "the most anti-free-speech presidency in American history" during a panel discussion on the Department of Justice subpoenaing reporters.
What he has done little of lately, according to a Washington Free Beacon review of his recent MS NOW appearances and his social media accounts, is bash Israel—with one exception, a July 22 segment in which Mohyeldin touted New York City mayor Zohran Mamdani's (D.) "very important" video message calling for the arrest of Netanyahu.
A spokesman for MS NOW, asked multiple times about Mohyeldin's future, said the network would not comment on personnel issues or employment contracts.
Industry observers say Mohyeldin is in a tough position in the fast-shrinking but still highly lucrative cable news business. A small number of star news personalities continue to draw staggeringly huge paychecks (Mohyeldin's MS NOW colleague Rachel Maddow earns a reported $25 million a year to work one day a week), but most cable news personalities have little to cheer about.
"If you signed a contract to be an anchor, and you are no longer an anchor, you will soon no longer have a contract," one network insider told the Free Beacon.
Mohyeldin's three cohosts on the just-canceled Weekend are faring better, by some measures. Antonia Hylton was moved to anchor daytime weekend programming. Catherine Rampell has other roles at the Bulwark and as MS NOW's economics editor. And Elise Jordan is working on a book about Dwight Eisenhower "and the women of the general's inner circle" for the prestigious Knopf publishing house.
Mohyeldin and his talent agent did not return requests for comment.
Mohyeldin's absence from the broadcast roster is fueling questions about his future at the left-wing network.
The desurfacing of Mohyeldin on MS NOW may suggest that management feels his views are too extreme for a network that may be on the auction block. Puck journalist Dylan Byers recently wrote, regarding MS NOW's parent company Versant, that "I have long been bearish about this business, which has seemed destined to fall into the hands of private equity and a likely acquire-and-fire doom loop."
MS NOW/MSNBC has been shedding its most polarizing personalities in the last few years. Joy Reid was fired in February 2025 after multiple scandals, including a 2018 scandal surrounding online homophobic comments and another scandal over offensive remarks about white women who didn't vote for Kamala Harris. Tiffany Cross, host of the weekend show The Cross Connection, was fired in 2022 after making a string of bizarre statements such as "Let's castrate Florida." Mehdi Hasan, another anti-Israel figure known for stoking antisemitism, had his show canceled in November 2023 and left the network to launch the far-left Zeteo news platform.
Amid these defenestrations, some powerful voices, including Maddow, have called out the network for targeting hosts of color and ethnic minorities for demotions and terminations amid an overall whitening of the network. The most prominent of the ousted hosts are people of color, even as MS NOW has doubled down on a white lineup of solo anchors like Nicolle Wallace, Jen Psaki, Maddow, Ari Melber, and Chris Hayes.
Reid, Hasan, and Mohyeldin were, by many estimations, the most anti-Israel MSNBC/MS NOW hosts at the cable network. MS NOW's biggest stars, including Maddow, have been less strident by comparison. And the married morning hosts Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski (whose father was an architect of the Camp David Accords) have been generally supportive of Israel.
On social media, some viewers accused MS NOW of burying its most vocal Israel critic.
"MSNBC has an award-winning journalist in Ayman Mohyeldin, yet he's been sidelined into guest segments alongside commentators like Claire McCaskill," one user opined on X last month. "In my view, @AymanM will never get his own show at MSNBC because he is an Arab Muslim. My advice: take the Mehdi Hasan route. They did the same thing to him. Bet on yourself."
The commenter pointed out that Jacob Soboroff was given his own MS NOW show even as Mohyeldin's show was taken away. Soboroff, the white, anti-Trump scion of a prominent Los Angeles family, made a name for himself at NBC News covering immigration.
Mohyeldin, however, remains in MS NOW limbo.
When Kutler announced the cancellation of Ayman in 2025, Mohyeldin confidently assured people he would soon be back on-air.
"I'm not leaving the network; in fact, quite the opposite," he said. "Despite the challenging and fearless ways we have covered stories on this show for more than two years, MSNBC has offered to extend my tenure at the company."
This time, however, Mohyeldin was vaguer.
"This certainly isn't a goodbye," he told viewers on the finale of Weekend. "You'll still see Catherine, Elise, Antonia, and myself on MS NOW, asking the hard questions, holding the powerful accountable, and telling the stories that matter to you and this country."
He did not mention an offer.
Update 2:28 p.m.: This piece has been updated since original publication.
