Kendis Gibson, a veteran anchor who worked most recently for MSNBC, is jumping to a new role at CBS’ Miami station, WFOR, where he will anchor the morning and noon newscasts.
The move shows ViacomCBS bringing in new local staffers under Wendy McMahon, co-president of the company’s news and stations unit, and Gibson says he welcomed the chance to take on a wider range of reporting than he was able to do at MSNBC, where he was anchoring early mornings on weekends. “I wanted to get away from working in the hyper-partisan 24/7 political news space,” he tells Variety. “This is a good chance to anchor a newscast that covers the full gamut of the news cycle which I love, including world news, entertainment news, human interest stories and stories important to local communities — and in an awesome city with a big commitment to local news from the top down.”
Gibson joined MSNBC as a weekend anchor in 2019, part of a bid by the NBCUniversal-owned cable-news outlet to feature more live programming on weekends, a period that was often filled with repeats of the jail documentary series “Lockup.” In recent weeks, however, MSNBC has started to run repeats of streaming opinion programs led by Zerlina Maxwell and Mehdi Hasan, in its early weekend hours. MSNBC has been working to shore up its ratings on weekends, where it has trailed competitors in the critical audience demographic of people between 25 and 54, the group most coveted by advertisers.
Gibson, who joined ABC News in 2014, had been an anchor of “World News Now” and “America This Morning,” an early-morning program. He has also worked for CBS News’ Newspath; for CNN and its sister network, HLN; and for Washington D.C.’s WJLA, among others.