MSNBC pivots to the hard left by firing Joy Reid

Joy Reid was apparently just too moderate for what media reporters are calling a “hard-left” shift at MSNBC, terminating both Reid and Rachel Maddow fill-in host Alex Wagner (who is married to Obama’s former White House chef), and by some reports, promoting former Biden White House press secretary Jen Psaki into a starring role.

These moves within a national media shake-up, with Jim Acosta quitting CNN for Substack, joining former Washington Post communist Jennifer Rubin on the same platform, and now reports that Lester Holt is stepping down at NBC News. Holt famously was given that promotion after the network axed Brian Williams for a series of wartime exaggerations and fictitious personal stories.

Reid’s presence on our screens could only be justified as a litmus test for an entire cottage industry of media watchdogs who focus their time and energy on whatever someone is saying on Fox News. Media Matters, Brian Stelter and Oliver Darcy, among several other progressive journalists, would spend days writing about a Tucker Carlson or Jesse Watters segment — and yet the lunacy and conspiratorial race-baiting nonsense that Reid espoused on a near-daily basis simply went unchallenged by those same people.

MSNBC claiming to double-down on going full left resistance while cutting Reid seems to be  head-scratcher to anyone not inside 30 Rockefeller Center. Reid has had been a part of the most notable controversies at the network and always seemed to survive unscathed due to lack of media pressure from her peers.

In 2017, for instance, a series of racist and homophobic posts were re-discovered from her old blog, The Reid Report. In the posts, she compared homosexuality to pedophilia, among other things. Reid and NBC famously claimed that she had been hacked, except the posts were under her administrative position. There would have had to be some clever time travel for that to have occurred. Reid and NBC at first announced they would be contacting the FBI to investigate. That was all allowed to fade into the media ether, though, with no follow-up from journalists, and Reid and the network carried on as though nothing had happened.

After nine Republicans were targeted for assassination on a DC baseball field by a Bernie Sanders campaign volunteer, Reid at the time all but blamed Steve Scalise for his own near-death injuries. While Scalise was still in intensive care, and recovering, Reid suggested that he deserved being shot due to his opposition to nationalized healthcare. Reid also snarked that the Capitol Police officer assigned to Scalise, and the one who stopped the shooting, was a black lesbian.

Last year, Reid compared Joe Biden surviving Covid to Donald Trump narrowly surviving an assassination attempt. Reid’s racists screeds only intensified when she discovered TikTok. None of these infractions seemed to matter to the higher-ups at MSNBC, who are now scrambling inside the building to placate staffers of her canceled show, which will air its final episode this week, reportedly.

Whatever special brand of usefulness MSNBC thought Joy Reid brought to a positive and informative media environment, meant to enlighten and educate viewers, should be studied for decades, as the executives apparently did not recognize Reid as a toxic, racist force for their network as they evermore embraced identity politics.

In the end, it wasn’t just government programs infected with DEI from top to bottom that didn’t survive President Trump’s new administration. It was also Joy Reid’s career at MSNBC.