Rachel Maddow Feared to Be 'Veering Into Full-Blown Diva Territory' Amid Her Furious Battle With MSNBC Bosses: 'It's a Bit Much for $25MILLION-A-Year Journalist to Host One Show Per Week'

MSNBC heavyweight Rachel Maddow has made a career out of speaking her mind. But RadarOnline.com can report the celebrated journalist may have gone too far in her unwavering support for fired former colleague Joy Reid.

Insiders said the one-day-a-week host is in danger of angering the wrong people – namely, her bosses.

As RadarOnline.com previously reported, new MSNBC president Rebecca Kutler has cleaned house at the ratings-starved network, axing several longtime employees.

Among the changes, Maddow, 51, will soon cease her five-night-a-week anchor duties and return to her cushy $25 million-a-year, Mondays-only routine.

The new prez also announced a major lineup overhaul, which included Reid's ousting and the cancellation of The ReidOut. In Reid's 7 pm timeslot, rotating anchors will temporarily host.

But that didn't sit well with Maddow, who used time on her own platform to blast the higher-ups, slamming the network on-air Monday and calling Reid's termination "very, very, very hard to take."

Maddow told her audience: "In all of the jobs I have had in all of the years I have been alive, there is no colleague for whom I have had more affection and more respect than Joy Reid.

"I love everything about her. I have learned so much from her. I have so much more to learn from her. I do not want to lose her as a colleague here at MSNBC, and personally, I think it is a bad mistake to let her walk out the door."

Maddow, who successfully led a de facto coup when her network hired, and quickly fired, former RNC Chair Ronna McDaniel, continued her tirade on upper management, seeming to address Kutler personally: "We want to grow and succeed and reach more people than ever and be resilient and stay here forever.

"I also believe … that the way to get there is by treating people well, finding good people, good colleagues, doing good work with them, and then having their back. That we could do a lot better on—a lot better."

This time, however, her comments were not as well received. Veteran media reporter Dylan Byers hinted Maddow, and her cushy new schedule, has started to venture into diva territory.

Byers said: "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 he adds the cost to placate her alone could have been spread out to save the jobs of nearly 125 fired staff members.