Joy Reid hosted the 7pm hour on MSNBC for nearly five years, providing a daily dose of progressive energy and verve that led into the network’s primetime programming. Then, in late February, Reid was suddenly forced out, and her show, The ReidOut, was cancelled as part of a broader programming shakeup at the network. Reid has since launched her own streaming show, The Joy Reid Show, and has a few things to say about the mainstream media she was once part of.
Now that it’s been eight months since you were abruptly fired by MSNBC, how do you view your departure?
I still miss my team. I love my little ReidOut team. We had a great family. We had an amazing, amazing time. And I love the people that I worked with, but I overall see my departure as a blessing, to be honest. I think in this moment, not being a part of corporate media is actually a gift. Because from now, on the outside looking in, I don’t know that I could live with the kind of restrictions that people in corporate media are facing. So I think – it was a blessing.
What kind of restrictions are you referring to?
It’s that these corporations are all doing business with the administration. They all have business before the FCC [Federal Communications Commission], and therefore they are going to make their content and the journalism being done at those institutions – they’re going to make it bow to the bigger corporate need.
In other words, Comcast is a donor to the Epstein ballroom. They’re going to give money to Donald Trump. Everyone is paying him. ABC paid him off, CBS paid him off, Comcast – they’re all bowing to his will or writing him a check. And therefore, everyone who works in those organizations has to be mindful that if they displease Donald Trump, if he notices their journalism and it makes him mad, he could have his Project 2025-author FCC chair [Brendan Carr] punish them.
If they have too much diversity, if they have too many Black people on air, if they hire too many minorities, too many gay people, too many women, if they’re too visibly diverse, he could have his FCC punish them.
And I’m looking at each of these entities. I’m looking at CBS being warped by being owned by a Trump fan who’s gobbling up the media, he and his dad [David and Larry Ellison], our new Murdochs, eating up the media.
And you can see the results at CBS News: mass firings at Paramount CBS. You can already see CBS News running stories under Bari Weiss that they would never, never have run, questioning whether the Gaza death count was real or whether people were dying of natural causes. The things that are happening at CBS – I can almost feel the visceral pain that CBS News employees have got to be feeling having this Substacker be their boss when they are longtime, experienced journalists having to answer to a rightwing Substacker. And a rightwing ombudsman.
You know, I’m watching ABC and you’re hearing these stories of even the View being pressured: “Not so much anti-Trumpism, please.” They’re there to comment on the news of the day, but, you know, curtail that. I’m hearing from friends that still work at MS NOW [MSNBC’s new name], whatever its new name is, having to work in a place that fired Matt Dowd for saying an absolutely true and inoffensive fact and now having to realize that he was dismissed summarily for saying a true thing about Charlie Kirk, and each of them could be as well. And knowing the pressures that are on the people there about what they can and cannot say, and that those pressures are being – they’re coming as Comcast has business before the administration, as ABC Disney does, as CBS Paramount does.
It seemed notable that top executives at Comcast, MSNBC’s owner, issued a memo denouncing Dowd’s comments about Kirk. [Dowd had said, after the shooting of conservative activist Charlie Kirk, that “hateful thoughts lead to hateful words, which then lead to hateful actions”.]
The things I hear just internally of people just feeling less freedom to do the journalism they know that they’re capable of. I mean, look, Rachel Maddow is still Rachel Maddow-ing. You know what I mean? Lawrence O’Donnell is still Lawrence O’Donnell-ing. The great journalists at MSNBC are still doing the great stuff they’ve done, and they’re still really tough on the administration. They’re still holding to their brands and to their integrity. So I’m not saying everyone is being suppressed. Obviously the voices are getting out. Chris Hayes is still Chris Hayes-ing. You know what I mean? I still see and hear the clips of people still doing the work. But the problem is everyone in this business right now, if you work for a corporate media entity, you know over your shoulder stands Donald Trump and Brendan Carr.
Everyone knows that, whether you’re in cable or broadcast. Brendan Carr cannot regulate cable news, but he can regulate Comcast. He can regulate your boss’s boss. And so I feel like I personally am grateful to not have to wake up every morning worrying about what punishment Brendan Carr might mete out to my organization and my company based on the journalism I do on my little show. I don’t want to wake up and think about that. I don’t want to think about, you know, whether or not Donald Trump tweeting at me somehow impacts my staff or impacts my executive producer or could get them in trouble. I am thankful not to have to think about that. [An MSNBC spokesperson said in response that “viewers who watch MSNBC any day of the week know that the values and tone of our coverage have not changed”.]
When you were at MSNBC, did you feel like you had the ability to push back on some of your larger coverage concerns at the network, or did you feel you had to stay in your lane?
I pretty much just focused on my show. I wasn’t there to be a critic of the way the network operated. Two ways that I did have some frustration was the amount of time we spent going live to Trump – when I was on my weekend show really. This was a big tension, and I think this was a tension that’s normal. I didn’t feel like every time Donald Trump belched we had to go live to him. And look, we had a difference of opinion. I didn’t want to go live to him, for instance, when he was at the National Cathedral, but the Women’s March was going on. And we have that tension. And so that’s normal stuff that happens inside of a network.
I definitely feel like on the coverage of Gaza, I had tremendous frustration that I felt like it was very difficult for us to get the other side of the story. And that wasn’t because of our network, that was because of the government of Israel not allowing journalists into Gaza and not allowing any objective reporting without a minder. And so that wasn’t my frustration with my network, that was a frustration with a foreign government that was trying to shape coverage of a genocide. But internally, I will say, you could feel that coverage of the genocide as a genocide was unwanted and that the people that I worked for were not really enthusiastic, I’ll say, about the coverage of that genocide as a genocide. That was not wanted. And now that I’ve left, I feel like that definitely contributed to my departure. Because I think when you see a genocide happening, you have an obligation as a journalist to cover it as what it is.
Where did you draw the line when you felt it was worth calling out your network on air and potentially risk your job?
Specifically on the Gaza issue, I felt like: “What was the point of having the platform if I couldn’t speak out against a genocide?” On that one, I knew that it was risky, and I had people constantly telling me: “Please stop talking about Gaza. You’re going to get fired.” I had people, even including my own family, who were worried about me, but to be honest with you, I never dreamed in a million years that they would lay off my whole staff. Normally they just lay off the host or cancel the show, and then they make the host a contributor.
I think what pushed Rachel [Maddow, who called the cancellation a “bad mistake”] to speak out in an incredibly valiant way, and I love and adore her, by the way – I think she is so brave and such a great journalist – but I think what pushed her was what enraged all of us, which is that they didn’t just cancel my show. You can cancel my show. I don’t own Comcast. I don’t own MSNBC. They laid off our whole staffs. Like, that is not normal. And I think if you go back and listen to her rant, it wasn’t just about me, it was about these incredible journalists, including on her own staff, on all of our staffs. That is not the way MSNBC has ever operated. … These are not people who are making millions of dollars a year. These are people with mortgages and rent to pay and families and children. And I was shocked that that happened to my team. Would I have felt differently if I thought my staff was in jeopardy? Yeah, I would have been more circumspect, but I still feel like I would have covered Gaza the way I did, honestly. I don’t regret that at all, because I think that is our obligation as journalists. I felt like I had to do it, but I would have had in the back of my mind my staff was in jeopardy. I never thought that. [The vast majority of Reid’s staffers were ultimately able to get other jobs at the network.]
Were you heartened that some of your former colleagues in MSNBC – Rachel Maddow, Lawrence O’Donnell and Stephanie Ruhle – called out Comcast for their donation to the East Wing ballroom project?
Absolutely. And they are the best of people. I’m so heartened by it, and yes, I think it’s brave, I think it’s smart, and I think they had to do it. … I feel like we have to have some integrity in journalism. Had they not said anything about Comcast giving to this ballroom, I think they wouldn’t have been able to sleep at night. So I’m glad they did it.
And I assume you would have done it also, if you were still on?
A hundred percent. Oh, a thousand percent. If I was still there, a thousand percent.
Have you found that your cable news audience has moved with you to your streaming show?
Absolutely, yeah. People who enjoyed me, people will still find me on Substack. They’re still gonna find me on my YouTube show, on The Joy Reid Show. They’ll still find me on my TikTok, on my [Instagram]. It’s just that it fragments the audience because they’re not all having to go to MSNBC. I have found that people are finding me where they’re comfortable and the mediums in which they’re comfortable. … It’s just a matter of you understanding in this business that you are your brand and that your company is not your brand.
And you’ve found it to be a good business so far?
Yeah, and I was not a YouTube person, so I’m very new to it. Thank god we have great partners. … So I have found a soft landing, and I’m grateful for the audience, and I’m very grateful to the partners that we have. And we’re building a business. Now it is different, right? My husband and I have had a production company for many, many years, but we haven’t had to make it our primary focus because we’ve always been doing other things. But now we’re focusing on it full-time and we are leaning into our entrepreneurial era. My husband’s been at it a lot longer because he was running that side of the business for a while. … Now we’re working on our own and I’m loving it. I’m loving the independence.
Is there anything you miss about having a nightly cable news show?
I am realizing it is an incredible blessing to have 15 staffers, 15 producers to make your TV. I used to be a booking producer, I used to be a producer-producer, a news producer, and I am a booking producer and a news producer again. It is so much more work. I am so blessed with our team, but our team are part-timers. We don’t have a full-time staff. Our full-time staff is my husband, myself. We hired our daughter to work for us. But we are a tiny, tiny, tiny team, so it is a lot harder to do things with far fewer people.
Last week, CBS News gutted their race and culture unit. NBC News also recently made cuts affecting its teams dedicated to covering Black, Asian American, Latino and LGBTQ+ communities. Do you think we are seeing an intentional unwinding of some of the moves that were made by media companies in response to the events of 2020 and the backlash to George Floyd’s killing?
It wasn’t because of George Floyd. It was because Barack Obama got elected. And suddenly these corporations were really being pushed by the [National Association of Black Journalists] and [National Association of Hispanic Journalists] and also by the LGBTQ organizations that work with the media to say,: “Hey, we need representation. You have a Black president. You need more voices, right?” And so these initiatives really were born around the Obama administration. I think the demise of them in the wake of this backlash against the George Floyd DEI revolution is part of the national backlash. There is just a general backlash among conservatives against any diversity initiatives or even any diversity, period, in the country. …
It feels like the media is capitulating to that and that they’re aligning their own policies with the administration self-protectively, because they don’t want to be punished. But also I think partly because in some ways these major media companies, which again are not run by liberals, they’re run by people who are maybe libertarian to somewhat conservative, they’ve been relieved of the burden of having to do diversity. So they don’t want to do it. If you did it reluctantly anyway, I don’t think it’s really bothering you to get rid of it.
