The Joy Reid era at MSNBC is over. The liberal commentator, who will be leaving her 7 p.m. weeknight show amidst a larger shakeup, was perhaps the network’s toughest critic of Donald Trump, delivering blistering critiques of both the president and his voters. Reid seemed to welcome controversy in a way that made her built for a contentious moment; after last year’s election, for instance, she told Latino Republican voters that they “own everything” that will happen to their families under Trump. The author of three books about politics, Reid’s personal story as the child of immigrants raised in Brooklyn was inspiring, and her status as a relatively rare Black woman in cable news made her a magnet both for fandom and vitriol. (Megyn Kelly, for instance, often delivered vituperative criticism of Reid’s work.)
The MSNBC reorganization will also affect anchor Alex Wagner, downshifting to contributor. And it suggests a desire, on the part of the venerable left-leaning outlet to find a formula to more ably report and comment on the Trump presidency while also preparing to join other NBCU cable networks in being spun off into a new company.
But it’s one more thing, too. Reid, on air, was a self-styled voice against the 45th (and now 47th) President’s dishonesty, and prejudice. And she began her career in public life speaking in a prejudiced way, and then dissembled when asked about it. It was an unfortunate, self-inflicted blow that, for as long as Reid stayed on the air, acted against MSNBC’s credibility.
Before her rise to fame, Reid blogged at a site called The Reid Report. There — between 2007 and 2009, Reid blogged about then-Florida Governor Charlie Crist, referring to him as “Miss Charlie” and tagging the posts “gay politicians.” (Crist, twice married to women, identifies as straight.) For this, Reid apologized, in 2018, when the posts emerged in the midst of her burgeoning career as a MSNBC weekend morning hosts. But further posts bubbled up on social media, in which — among other things — the liberal blogger continued to speculate in a crass manner about Crist’s personal life, suggested that gay men prey on young men “in a way that many people consider to be immoral,” and said she was repulsed by the film “Brokeback Mountain” and said “Does that make me homophobic? Probably.” And for these, she did not apologize, exactly.
In a 2018 statement, per the BBC, she claimed that the posts were “fabricated” by “an unknown, external party” who had gained access to her blog; she said she’d hired a cyber-security expert. Though she later conceded that no evidence of hacking had been found, she would not own up to writing the posts, even as she issued a blanket apology, noting that “I genuinely do not believe I wrote those hateful things, because they are completely alien to me. But I can definitely understand, based on things I have tweeted and have written in the past, why some people don’t believe me.”
A New York Times report from 2018 contains suggestive reporting, including that Reid, via lawyers, asked the online database the Internet Archive to remove her site from its records, despite the Archive finding no evidence of hacking. Later, the website seemed to activate an exclusion protocol to remove itself, while conversations with lawyers were still ongoing. It was as though people acting on her behalf were trying to short-circuit the conversation entirely before she could face consequences.
The moment during which Reid was actively blogging was, legitimately, a very different time as regards gay rights; Barack Obama, for instance, swept into office in 2008 without supporting gay marriage, the same night that the gay marriage ban Proposition 8 won a majority of ballots in blue-state California. A Reid who was capable of admitting that she had written fairly out-of-pocket but not out-of-the-mainstream things at a different moment in history might have been a study in how views evolve — she might, funnily enough, have been a still more compelling broadcast figure, for the evolution she plainly underwent.
Instead, she continued to choose legalistic speech and awkward constructions to dance around the widely reported fact of there being no evidence of hacking or malfeasance on the blog she ran. Reid took her prime-time slot in 2020; she’d had two years to reflect on the question of whether she still believed she had not written her objectionable posts. “It’s two years ago, so I don’t spend a whole lot of time thinking about that old blog,” she told an interviewer. “What I genuinely believe is that I truly care about the L.G.B.T. people in my own life.”
The cover-up, often, is worse than the crime. Reid’s blog hosted posts that contained garden-variety bigotry; faced with that, she first told a strange story about being hacked and then, years later, acted as if it was a ludicrous exhumation of ancient history even to be asked about the cover story. This is not a person who, in public, has demonstrated a clear grasp on the concept of truth and honesty; it is also not an anchor who seems to get that the concept of “apologizing” involves acknowledging wrong done, rather than just assuming everyone will go along with a TV star saying that she feels bad about whatever bad things have happened, whether she did it or not.
Reid’s departure surely involves a complex calculus of reasons, and she thrived on MSNBC’s air for years in the wake of this story. But for viewers with long memories, her critiques of others’ actions and beliefs rang hollow, because she seemed so unaware of or uninterested in the impact of her own. This was someone who welcomed the debate — as long as it wasn’t about her.
