Joy Reid Keeps Her Job Despite Multiple ‘Roseanne Moments’
https://www.aim.org/aim-column/joy-reid-keeps-her-job-despite-multiple-roseanne-moments/
Joy Reid Keeps Her Job Despite Multiple ‘Roseanne Moments’
by Brian McNicoll on June 4, 2018
A lot of liberals were overjoyed when Roseanne Barr got fired from her show for making racist comments.
Joy Reid was not among them.
Reid has had her own set of Roseanne moments – problems with racist commentary, and the attention paid to Barr’s comments have only heightened pressure on her employer, MSNBC, to fire her.
“MSNBC’s Joy Reid problem isn’t going away,” read the headline on Columbia Journalism Review, a key magazine that covers the industry.
“MSNBC Refuses to Fire Joy Reid Despite Anti-Semitic Blog Posts and 2017 Endorsement of Nazi Website,” wrote the Zero Hedge blog.
“MSNBC host Joy Reid faces new questions about her old blog,” wrote the Washington Post.
The list of Reid’s transgressions continues to grow.
A Buzzfeed story last week said Reid encouraged readers of her now-defunct Reidblog to watch “Loose Change 9/11,” a movie produced in part by Alex Jones of Infowars, that argues the 9/11 attacks were orchestrated by the U.S. government.
“The fundamental question is: Do you believe the official story of 9/11?” Reid wrote. “If you do, great. If you don’t, then everything that happened after that is called into serious question. Even if you’re agnostic, or you tend to believe that al Qaeda attacked the World Trade Center and Pentagon and that the government had no warning such a thing could happen, it’s worth taking a second look.”
The perpetrators were identified suspiciously quickly, Reid wrote, and questioned, as do many “truther” articles, why the WTC-7 building collapsed even though it was not hit by an airplane.
“For that matter, why did any of the WTV [sic] buildings fall?” Reid wrote. “Somehow I think it will be a generation before we get the full story on what happened on 9/11.”
Also last week, the Federalist revealed blog posts from July 2006 in which Reid attacked CNN’s Wolf Blitzer for being “too nice to Jews” and an “AIPAC flak,” referring to a prominent Washington policy group that supports Jewish issues.
The December before that, she had suggested former Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was on the mark when he suggested the “Zionist regime” of Israel should just relocate to Europe.
“You believe the Jews were oppressed, why should the Palestinian Muslims have to pay the price?” she wrote. “You oppressed them, so give a part of Europe to the Zionist regime so they can establish any government they want. We would support it. So, Germany and Austria, come and give one, two or any number of your provinces to the Zionist regime so they can create a country there … and the problem will be solved at its root.
“I hate to admit that Mr. Amadinejad [sic] has a point. God is not a real estate broker. He can’t just give you land 1,000 years ago that you can come back and claim today.”
Earlier, journalists had revealed homophobic comments Reid made on her blog. In one piece, she says she could not watch the movie Brokeback Mountain because “most straight people start to cringe at the sight of two men kissing.”
Reid has suggested the blog posts revealed were not written by her but rather inserted into her blog by hackers. MSNBC is said to be standing by her while the FBI investigates the claim.
Reid says she “genuinely” does not believe she “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.”
But journalists on the right are skeptical anything will happen to her.
Daniel Greenfield wrote at Frontpage magazine’s website: “But while Roseanne’s comments were enough to get her fired and her show canceled, no amount of vile posts from Joy Reid will get MSNBC to dump her. Because there’s a double standard there.”