BY: LBS STAFF
Published 5 years ago
Joy Reid is about to make history as cable’s first black female prime-time anchor.
Back in March, Page Six first reported that Reid was on a short list — along with Shep Smith and Steve Kornacki — to take over the slot occupied by Chris Matthews until his abrupt exit from MSNBC.
Now we’re told that the deal is all but done for Reid to assume the 7 p.m. hour.
Reid hosts “AM Joy” weekends on the network, but has filled in for its big prime-time stars like Rachel Maddow and Chris Hayes.
The spot opened up suddenly after Matthews — who’d been hosting “Hardball” on the network since 1999, and had been expected to retire soon anyway — quit after accusations of “inappropriate comments,” including flirting with a guest off camera.
Meanwhile, Reid comes with something of a scandal of her own. In 2018, she apologized on-air for homophobic posts on her old blog, the Reid Report.
Although she claimed that hackers had altered her remarks, comments on the blog included a view that “most straight people cringe at the sight of two men kissing,” and that Reid couldn’t watch “Brokeback Mountain,” the romantic movie about two male cowboys.
In an in-depth apology on “AM Joy,” she said, “Here’s what I know. I genuinely do not believe I wrote those hateful things, because they are completely alien to me … But I can definitely understand, based on things I have tweeted and have written in the past, why some people don’t believe me. I’ve not been exempt from being dumb or cruel or hurtful to the very people I want to advocate for. I own that. I get it. And for that, I am truly, truly sorry.”
A panel of LGBTQ community leaders joined her for a discussion, and Washington Post writer and friend Jonathan Capehart told her, “I would not even be talking to my own mother if she had not evolved … Joy, when this happened I was hurt, but not by anything attributed to you.”
[via Page Six]
