Joy Reid Concludes Lackluster Career at MSNBC

Joy Reid wore an MSNBC-branded tracksuit Monday night while hosting the final episode of her show on the failing left-wing network. The defiant performance came after news leaked on Sunday that MSNBC was canceling The ReidOut and firing Reid due to her abysmally low ratings.

The show topic was the same as it was for every single one of Reid’s shows when Trump has been in office: How to defend democracy and defeat white supremacy when “fascism isn’t just coming it’s already here.” {snip}

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{snip} Network employees were distraught after media outlets reported the news before MSNBC could notify Reid’s staff. Rebecca Kutler, who took over as network president last month, called an emergency meeting filled with the “pointed questions” and “raw emotions” as employees vented their “frustration and disbelief,” according to media reporter Oliver Darcy.

{snip} Reid’s show was one of the lowest-rated programs on one of the lowest-rated news networks. Last Thursday’s episode of The ReidOut drew just 59,000 viewers in the coveted 25-54 age demographic. {snip}

Reid made her first public comments on Sunday during a Zoom call with the podcast “Win With Black Women.” The host sobbed sloppy tears while she defiantly defended her show from critics, insisting she was “not sorry” that she “went hard on so many issues.” Among other things, she refused to apologize for attacking Israel and “defending books that people find inconvenient, you know that Nikole Hannah-Jones put into our spirit that we need to understand 1619 as the real founding of this country,” referring to the controversial and historically inaccurate 1619 Project.

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{snip} Left-wing scolds have reacted furiously to Kutler’s recent actions, accusing MSNBC of deliberately targeting minority hosts while promoting boring white women such as Jen Psaki, the former White House press secretary under Joe Biden.

“Everytime MSNBC has a ‘shakeup’ the Black woman solo led show is ALWAYS the first to go,” wrote Ambassador Digital Magazine editor Musa Jackson. “Tamron Hall, Tiffany Cross, Zerlina Maxwell and now Joy Reid. Boycott MSNBC.” Network contributor Elie Mystal argued Reid was fired for being black and for being nice to other black people. He accused MSNBC of treating “black folks as interchangeable.”

Before Reid’s firing was announced, Variety reported (somewhat bafflingly) that the coming shakeup at MSNBC would reflect the network’s eagerness to “maintain its progressive stance, rather than trying to tack towards middle ground.” That’s interesting, given that Reid was widely regarded among normal Americans as one of the most consistently unhinged purveyors of racially charged invective to be allowed on television. Among the many benefits of Reid’s show being canceled is that she’ll now be able to devote even more time to tracking down the alleged “hackers” she accused of having “accessed and manipulated” her blog to post hateful content—targeting gays, Jews, and Muslims—that was “fabricated.”

Donald Trump reacted to the news of Reid’s departure in characteristically epic fashion, describing the MSNBC host as a “mentally obnoxious racist” and “one of the least talented people in television.” {snip}

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