MSNBC’S JOY REID NAMED HOST OF ‘THE REIDOUT’ MAKING HER FIRST BLACK WOMAN TO HOST NIGHTLY EVENING NEWS SHOW
She becomes one of the few Black women to anchor a major American evening news program. The move was made by new leadership at NBC News, which runs the liberal-leaning cable network.
Joy Reid, who rose to television fame as a sharp critic of President Trump and commentator on liberal politics and race, will become the host of a new nightly show on MSNBC, the network announced on Thursday, placing her among a handful of Black women to anchor an American evening news program.
Ms. Reid, 51, who has hosted the MSNBC weekend talk show “AM Joy” since 2016, will move to the 7 p.m. hour on July 20. Her show, “The ReidOut,” succeeds “Hardball” and its host, Chris Matthews, who was forced to resign in March after a series of on-air gaffes and accusations of sexist behavior in the workplace.
Ms. Reid’s promotion is a significant programming move by Cesar Conde, the new chairman of NBC’s news networks. Black women, including Gayle King of CBS and Robin Roberts of ABC, hold leading roles in morning and daytime television, but none currently host a nightly evening show on a major network. The last to do so was Gwen Ifill, who co-anchored “PBS NewsHour” until shortly before her death in 2016.
In an interview on Wednesday from her home in Harlem, Ms. Reid cited Ms. Ifill and two other Black anchors, Deborah Roberts and Carole Simpson, as role models.
“Evening and prime-time news has been a universe of white men really since I was growing up,” Ms. Reid said. “For somebody who grew up as a nerdy kid obsessed with news, watching ‘Nightline’ and ‘Meet the Press,’ the idea of being a part of that family has always just been kind of overwhelming.”
“The ReidOut” will be based in Washington and focus on political analysis and punditry, but Ms. Reid said she also planned to address race, class, policing and other “cataclysmic social issues we need to reckon with.”
“I am a Black mom, a Black woman, a Black daughter,” said Ms. Reid, who is married with three children. “I am also a journalist who can conceptualize that pain from a unique point of view. Every day I’m in this job, I’m very conscious of that responsibility to make that collective voice heard. It’s unique to do that as a Black woman.”
Executives at MSNBC are hopeful that Ms. Reid will attract a younger audience at 7, where Mr. Matthews’s ratings lagged behind Fox News and CNN. Ms. Reid has a big online fan base — search the hashtag #reiders — and interacts with critics and supporters on Twitter, a realm where Mr. Matthews rarely engaged.
Her progressive bona fides, however, were called into question in 2017 when homophobic posts and comments from “The Reid Report,” a blog she wrote in the mid- to late 2000s, resurfaced on social media.
Ms. Reid apologized for writing mocking claims that Charlie Crist, the former Florida governor, was gay. But additional offensive posts emerged. Along with opposing gay marriage, she opined that “most straight people cringe at the sight of two men kissing” and that “a lot of heterosexuals, especially men, find the idea of homosexual sex to be … well … gross.” She said Rachel Maddow, who was not yet her colleague, held views “at the left-most end of the political spectrum.”
Ms. Reid initially claimed those posts had been fabricated and inserted into the archives of her blog by hackers intending to defame her. She even hired a cybersecurity expert. Later, she acknowledged that there was little evidence that the posts had been faked.
“I genuinely do not believe I wrote those hateful things because they are completely alien to me,” she told viewers in April 2018 in a lengthy apology, saying she had grown up “in a household that, like many in America, had conservative views on L.G.B.T.Q. issues.”
“The person I am now is not the person I was then,” Ms. Reid told viewers. Many liberal pundits defended her, including Jonathan Capehart, Jeffrey Toobin and Joan Walsh.
Asked on Wednesday if she still believed she had not written the posts, Ms. Reid said: “It’s two years ago, so I don’t spend a whole lot of time thinking about that old blog. What I genuinely believe is that I truly care about the L.G.B.T. people in my own life. I care about being a good ally, a good person, and making sure that my voice is authentic, that I can make a difference.”
NBC has pledged to improve its diversity, an area where its news networks have struggled. Mr. Conde, a former chairman of Telemundo who succeeded NBC News’s previous chairman, Andrew Lack, in May, said this week that he wanted a work force that was 50 percent nonwhite, with employees split evenly by gender.
“AM Joy” was created after a previous weekend host, Melissa Harris-Perry, left MSNBC, accusing the network of sidelining her. “I am not a token, mammy or little brown bobble head,” Ms. Harris-Perry, who is Black, wrote in an email to NBC staff at the time.
