Welcome back to Forgotten Fact Checks, a weekly column produced by National Review’s News Desk. This week, we look at Joy Reid’s most inflammatory commentary from her now-canceled show, round up the liberal backlash to the show’s axing, and cover more media misses.
Liberal Pundits Blame Race for Joy Reid’s Cancellation
The ReidOut is out at MSNBC.
Joy Reid’s show has been axed by the liberal network after it saw a 53 percent decline in post-election viewership.
It’s truly a wonder that the program — which first began airing in the 7 p.m. slot in July 2020 — lasted this long.
While her show never generated great ratings, Reid’s constant race-baiting and half-baked partisanship did produce a steady stream of viral social media clips. Whether she was attacking the Latino GOP voters who “own everything” that happens to their families under this administration or the Trump supporters who allegedly resemble Islamic extremists, Reid could be counted on to deliver a nightly dose of outrage to her meager audience.
In fact, she’s one of the few anchors who have had an entire Forgotten Fact Checks column dedicated to her, after she compared Trump to Hitler and dismissed lawmakers and voters who were troubled about the U.S. border crisis, claiming they were acting as “old Southerners” who resisted integration “by any means necessary.”
Reid’s ouster was orchestrated by MSNBC’s new president, Rebecca Kutler, according to the New York Times. Taking The ReidOut’s place will be panel show featuring commentary from Symone Sanders Townsend, Michael Steele, and Alicia Menendez, who are the current co-hosts of MSNBC’s weekend morning show, The Weekend.
But despite Reid’s falling ratings and her show’s penchant for peddling falsehoods and inflammatory rhetoric, liberals were devastated to see the show go – with many insisting that her exit was merely a product of her race.
“She’s a blunt Black woman, so of course her show is canceled. Not lost on any of us,” Wajahat Ali said on Bluesky.
“Everytime MSNBC has a ‘shakeup’ the black woman solo led show is ALWAYS the first to go,” the Daily Beast’s Danielle Moodie said.
The Nation’s Elie Mystal said that we have Reid to thank for his television career, “as do so many other Black voices y’all never would have heard of if not for her.”
“And that’s why she’s gone. They can treat black folks as interchangeable, but everybody Black knows that Joy was indispensable,” he wrote.
Meanwhile, former MSNBC host Keith Olbermann pointed his ire at MSNBC host Joe Scarborough, claiming that the network had a “Joe Scarborough problem,”rather than a “Joy Reid problem.” “Until he is fired, MSNBC will not recover. Shuffling tepid shows in and out does nothing,” he said. Many liberals were upset that Scarborough and his co-host Mika Brzezinski sat down with Trump at Mar-a-Lago in November after his big electoral win.
Trump, for his part, called MSNBC a “threat to our democracy” in a Saturday-morning Truth Social post. “MSNBC, COMMONLY KNOWN AS MSDNC, IS A THREAT TO OUR DEMOCRACY. SUCH LYING AND MISREPRESENTATION. BAD PEOPLE AT THE TOP,” he wrote.
Reid herself had used her show to blast Trump and his supporters on many occasions, including last Thanksgiving, when she expressed support for her fellow leftists who might not want to share their table with conservatives. “Make your own dinner, MAGA,” she said.
“You right-wingers shouldn’t have to suffer the consequences of your votes? ‘You don’t want to be around me because I voted for fascism. No fair. I am coughing on you with COVID, but you want me to wear a mask for your safety? No fair. My body, my choice.’ Well, here’s an alternative thought — make your own dinner, MAGA. Make your own sandwiches, wipe your own tears, troll amongst yourselves with Elon, and leave us alone,” she said at the time.
During his inauguration for his second term, Reid criticized Trump’s expansionist mindset as “manifest destiny,” which she called “one of the most racist concepts in the history of America.”
She proved on several occasions that she seemingly lived in an alternate reality, including when she likened Trump surviving an assassination attempt to Biden surviving Covid.
Reid also left viewers scratching their heads after she claimed in November that Kamala Harris’s losing presidential campaign had been “flawlessly” run. But perhaps it’s no wonder Reid thought that the campaign had been flawlessly run, as she claimed in 2022 that most Americans don’t care about inflation, don’t know what the word means, and won’t vote based on it.
Reid was no stranger to controversy even before her show began airing; in 2018, she was forced to apologize for a series of posts on her now-defunct blog that featured anti-gay statements and a suggestion that Israeli Jews should return to Europe.
She first tried to dismiss the comments as the result of hacking but later owned up to writing the posts herself: “While I published my blog, starting in 2005, I wrote thousands of posts in real time on the issues of the day. There are things I deeply regret and am embarrassed by, things I would have said differently and issues where my position has changed. Today I’m sincerely apologizing again,” Reid said in a statement to National Review at the time. “I’m sorry for the collateral damage and pain this is causing individuals and communities caught in the crossfire.
Reid’s exit was not the only big TV shakeup of the week. NBC’s Lester Holt announced Monday that he would soon step down from the NBC Nightly News, a program he has anchored for ten years. Holt said he would leave the show at the start of summer but remain on at the network, where he will continue hosting Dateline.
The network did not immediately say who would replace Holt on the Nightly News.
Headline Fail of the Week
NPR brings us this bit of hard-hitting news: “As Trump takes over leadership at Kennedy Center, some protest through dance.”
“Protesters chanted across Washington, D.C., on Monday to demonstrate against executive orders signed by President Donald Trump. But outside the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, one of the performing arts landmarks of the United States, there was a different kind of protest: a dance,” NPR’s Elizabeth Blair wrote. “Thirty-four dancers performed The Nelken Line, a piece by choreographer Pina Bausch that pays homage to the seasons. It’s been performed widely since Bausch created it in 1982. There’s even a tutorial.”
Media Misses
— CNN anchor Pamela Brown apparently missed the Biden administration’s celebration of the “historic” appointment of Department of Energy nuclear official Sam Brinton. Brown reacted with astonishment when a guest on her show brought up the “non-binary” former Biden-administration official who stole several women’s suitcases from airports and then wore the women’s clothes; Brinton pled guilty to petit larceny. After Brown accused the Trump administration of “trying to claw back several employees who oversaw nuclear weapons,” Representative Tim Burchett (R., Tenn.) delivered the evidently astonishing news to Brown: “You talk about nuclear secrets, you had a person who was in charge of nuclear secrets, a man, who dressed up as a woman, would go into the airport and steal women’s luggage, was overseeing those nuclear secrets under the Biden administration, and I never heard y’all say a peep about that.” Brown replied, ”I don’t know anything about that.”
— What’s old is new again at CNN: Former Republican Congressman Joe Walsh suggested during an appearance on the network that Trump may be a “Russian asset” or “plant” of the Russian government because of the president’s criticisms of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky.
— The BBC appended a disclaimer to its new documentary Gaza: How to Survive a Warzone, after it unintentionally profiled the son of a Hamas member. A 13-year-old subject of the film, Abdullah, who also narrates the film, was later found to be the son of Hamas’s deputy minister of agriculture, according to investigative journalist David Collier.
“Since the transmission of our documentary on Gaza, the BBC has become aware of the family connections of the film’s narrator, a child called Abdullah,” the clarification read. “We’ve promised our audiences the highest standards of transparency, so it is only right that as a result of this new information, we add some more detail to the film before its retransmission. We apologise for the omission of that detail from the original film.”
“The new text reads: ‘The narrator of this film is 13-year-old Abdullah. His father has worked as a deputy agriculture minister for the Hamas-run government in Gaza. The production team had full editorial control of filming with Abdullah.’”