A look back at the vile MSNBC host’s career lowlights.
M SNBC fired host Joy Reid last week, airing the final episode of her show on February 24.
Nothing of value was lost.
Until her unceremonious ouster, Reid inhabited a unique space in media as one of the dimmest and most vicious voices in political commentary.
Let’s first address the dimwittery. Few in cable news media can boast of such a tenuous understanding of American politics, as evidenced by Reid’s flabbergasted reaction to Donald Trump’s 2024 defeat of Kamala Harris. Against all reason and facts, Reid maintained even after Election Day that Harris had run a perfect campaign.
“Nothing that was true yesterday about how flawlessly this campaign was run, is not true now. I mean, this really was a historic flawlessly run campaign,” the former host asserted.
The empress of cable midwits added, “Queen Latifah never endorses anyone. She came out and endorsed her. She had every prominent celebrity voice. She had the Taylor Swift, the Swifties, she had the B-hive. You could not have run a better campaign in that short period of time. I still think that’s true.”
Never mind the bizarre “white dudes for Harris” campaign, the far-too-niche “brat” marketing, or the disastrous attempt to marry “joy” with “that guy is literal Hitler” as a core campaign theme. Never mind Harris’s refusal to prepare for the few media interviews she granted, managing to bungle even the friendly ones. Never mind the decision to weigh in on a short-lived “scandal” involving Trump’s visit to Arlington Cemetery, all of which called attention to the disastrous Afghanistan withdrawal under Biden’s watch, or the decision to use the final moments of the campaign to hold an emergency daytime presser in front of the vice president’s residence to discuss a gossipy Atlantic article whose shelf life was all of 48 hours, or the attempt to win over voters with the inexplicable bear hug of the Cheney family. Never mind the Harris campaign’s truly regrettable decision to nominate primo weirdo Governor Tim Walz as an antidote to Republican “weird.”
Sure, those things sound bad when you put it like that. But what about Queen Latifah?
Reid’s 2024 postmortem is but one example of her overwhelming ignorance. Other examples include her alleging incorrectly that Supreme Court Justice Neil Gorsuch holds a seat “stolen” by Republicans following the death of the late Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg. Gorsuch was confirmed in 2017 and served with Ginsburg, who did not die until 2020. Reid also once claimed that the polling website 538 was named for the margin in Florida “when the Republican SCOTUS reversed the 2000 election during a recount, making Dubya the president.” None of that’s true. First, the margin in Florida was 537 votes. Second, the Supreme Court didn’t reverse the 2000 election (Bush always led in every count). Finally, “538” refers to the number of electors in the Electoral College. But other than that, that’s some solid work.
There’s more where this sort of commentary comes from, but there is only so much server space available on the internet.
Another problem with Reid is that she is a liar.
If you can believe it, there was a moment when internet sleuths uncovered a cache of Reid’s old blog posts, some of which contained content that she herself would now characterize as homophobic and Islamophobic. Yet rather than owning up to her youthful indiscretions and asserting that she had matured in her thinking, she alleged a shadowy conspiracy involving time travel. Really. She claimed that someone had retroactively hacked into her blog and posted words that were not hers. She claimed this even though page caches, most notably in the Internet Archive and the Library of Congress, showed no evidence of meddling: nothing had been changed in the posts since their publication date. Reid even got the FBI involved, promising that agents of the state would soon find evidence of nefarious hackers hellbent on making her, a very important person, look bad.
The FBI never found anything, and Reid’s employer never reprimanded her for the lie. Nothing will ever top the Tale of the Mysterious Blog Hacker.
The final problem with Reid is that she is an insufferable jerk. Indeed, you’d be hard-pressed to find anyone in media as small-minded and petty as Reid.
When a deranged left-wing gunman nearly wiped out part of the Republican congressional caucus on June 14, 2017, as they practiced for the Congressional Baseball Game, Reid didn’t question whether extreme left-wing political rhetoric might have played a small role in the shooter’s radicalization. Instead, she seized the opportunity of the near-assassination of Representative Steve Scalise to review his voting record, implying that the congressman may have inspired or even deserved it.
Much later, Reid implied that those in the media paying closer attention to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine than to the civil war in Yemen were racists.
“As the world watches the devastation unfold in Ukraine, nearly 4,000 miles away, another crisis is deepening that we don’t hear much about in the U.S., and that is the war in Yemen,” Reid said, adding that “the coverage of Ukraine has revealed a pretty radical disparity in how human Ukrainians look and feel to Western media compared to their browner and blacker counterparts, with some reporters using very telling comparisons in their analyses of the war.”
Never mind the geopolitical implications of Russia invading westward toward NATO territory. It’s probably racism.
Elsewhere, when Republican Governor Ron DeSantis joked that his support from South African–born billionaire Elon Musk meant he enjoyed support from African Americans, Reid became apoplectic and, of course, accused the governor of being a racist.
“I’ve said before that [DeSantis is] a humorless, more openly fascist version of Trump,” she said. “Here he is displaying the former quality in that for him, ‘humor’ means mocking Black Americans with his own, idiotic and offensive version of replacement theory. Black Floridians take note.”
And then there is Reid’s historical obsession with Jews. In 2006, for example, she complained on her now-defunct blog that CNN’s Wolf Blitzer was too soft on Jews.
Blitzer is a “former flak [sic] for the American Israeli Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC),” she wrote in 2006. “He doesn’t even try to hide his affinity for his Israeli guests, or his partisanship for their cause, while turning instantly to prosecutorial mode when questioning any guest who has the dumb luck to be an Arab or Muslim in King Blitzer’s court. It’s actually quite stunning how brazen Blitzer’s bias has become.”
Laughably, when DeSantis remarked on billionaire George Soros’s political advocacy for Democratic causes, which is a documented fact, Reid accused the executive of being an antisemite. DeSantis, she said, is using “dog whistles” to promote a “meme, this idea among the right that African Americans, that black folks in positions of power are controlled by some Jewish overseer who is pulling the strings.”
As a reminder, Reid once called the late Republican donor Sheldon Adelson, who was Jewish, an “American oligarch” who owns “a political party” and whose “greed literally knows no limits.”
Last year, after a wealthy college kid allegedly murdered UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson, Reid remarked that she kinda-sorta understood the slaying.
“Let’s just be clear,” she said in defense of the accused killer, “there’s a real hatred for these companies that is on social media right now and also in real life, too. At the time he was killed, the victim, Brian Thompson, was CEO of the largest private insurer in the U.S.”
“As CEO he was embroiled with a lawsuit of consolidation, United has gobbled up dozens of insurance companies over the decades to become not only the larger insurer in the U.S., but by profits the largest in the world, and they exist in an industry that is all about consolidation and profit where basically four to five companies control everything and care little about health care consumers in the minds of many Americans,” she added.
For MSNBC, however, the real problem was simpler: No one watched Reid’s show. The only thing lower than her particularly noxious brand of gutter commentary was her ratings.
That it took MSNBC this long to give her the heave-ho is a genuine mystery.
At least with Tucker Carlson and Bill O’Reilly, Fox News could point to gangbuster ratings and ad revenues. But what good reason did MSNBC have to keep Reid on for as long as it did? It’s anyone’s guess.
At any rate, MSNBC brass have, for the moment, sobered up enough to remember they’re running an actual business and not a foundation for the benefit of Joy Reid.