By late summer 2025, a peculiar rumor began circulating across social media: Rachel Maddow, the MSNBC anchor, had quietly launched her own newsroom, joined by CBS late-night host Stephen Colbert and former MSNBC host Joy Reid.
The story gained traction after CBS announced that “The Late Show With Stephen Colbert” would end in May 2026, and months after MSNBC abruptly canceled Reid’s program. On Facebook, a video post featuring still images of Maddow and Colbert drew more than 610,000 views, its caption heralding the formation of a “news revolution.” Similar claims spread on Threads, X, Bluesky, Instagram and LinkedIn, often accompanied by images that appeared to have been generated by artificial intelligence.
But a closer look reveals no evidence the trio is joining forces. Searches across major news outlets turned up nothing. Instead, the rumor appears to have originated on ad-heavy blogs and was amplified by Facebook pages managed largely outside the United States, according to transparency records reviewed by Snopes.
Maddow herself addressed the speculation in late July on her MSNBC broadcast. “I have not founded my own news network, nor am I planning to,” she told viewers. “Why would I do that, when I work at MSNBC?”
The episode is part of a broader pattern: fabricated stories, often produced with AI tools, crafted to generate clicks and advertising revenue. The 1,200-word article at the center of this latest rumor bore the hallmarks of AI writing, according to detection sites like Copyleaks.
This is not the first time Maddow has been at the center of such false claims. In July, she also debunked an online story alleging she had turned to surrogacy to have a child, and another that used AI-generated images to falsely suggest she had taken part in Texas flood relief efforts.
In the end, the newsroom that Maddow supposedly founded — with Colbert and Reid as partners — exists only in the imagination of opportunistic publishers, eager to profit from misinformation in an age when the line between the authentic and the artificial grows ever thinner.