MSNBC’s Joy Reid is in trouble and it’s not because she wrote some unfashionable, politically incorrect things a decade or so ago on The Reid Report, her now defunct blog. It’s because she has insulted everyone’s intelligence by telling a ridiculous lie to explain it. Reid expects people to believe that hackers infiltrated her blog twelve years ago and added posts in an effort to make her look “homophobic.”
For now, NBC is standing by the host who has a two-hour MSNBC morning show that airs on Saturday and Sunday. NBC is likely betting that the controversy will blow over in a week or two without doing much damage to Reid’s (or the network’s) reputation.
However, the Internet archive (aka the Wayback Machine) has disputed her story, saying in a blog post on Tuesday that its records had not been compromised.
According to the site, it was first contacted in December by Reid’s lawyers, asking it to take down “fraudulent” posts that were “inserted into legitimate content” in the archive of her blog.
“When we reviewed the archives, we found nothing to indicate tampering or hacking of the Wayback Machine versions,” the Internet Archive post said.
Later Tuesday night, however, NBC representatives relayed a statement from Reid’s “cyber-security expert,” Jonathan Nichols, backing up her claim that the offending posts were the work of hackers. The NBC reps also shared letters her lawyers sent to Google and the Internet Archive in December, asking them to delete the posts — which is hardly exonerating, as it’s just an attempt to rid the internet of her embarrassing posts.
The Daily Beast, which runs Reid’s columns, meanwhile, is suspending her columns until there is a resolution in the case.
Daily Beast exec editor @NoahShachtman sent this note out to staff today regarding the @JoyAnnReid situation. He says reporters @kpoulsen and @maxwelltani are investigating her claims and examining her history: “In the meantime, we’re going to hit pause on Reid’s columns…” pic.twitter.com/eJwwFeHSCn
— Oliver Darcy (@oliverdarcy) April 25, 2018
In the meantime, Reid’s hacking excuse has become somewhat of a laughingstock on Twitter.
“There’s not a single fashionable opinion that Joy Reid doesn’t have or isn’t happy to denounce you for not having,” Fox News host Tucker Carlson said Wednesday night. “But, she wasn’t always this way.”
Carlson pointed out that before Reid adopted her ultra-liberal MSNBC persona, “she opposed gay marriage, mocked gay people and people she thought were gay.” He said that if she had just explained that her views had changed over time, most people would have forgiven her, “but that’s not what Joy Reid did.”
“Instead she lied about it,” Tucker declared. “She claimed she never wrote those blog posts in the first place — someone else did. She said she’d been hacked. Sinister agents — perhaps employed by Vladimir Putin — somehow broke into her blog retroactively to add the remarks.”
He continued: “She said it was a disinformation campaign — waged by whom? We don’t know. Shadowy forces. That was her explanation. It was a crock — a total crock. And we know it was a crock because Reid’s blog posts were archived by other websites — including the Library of Congress here in Washington — all the way back to 2006. That means in order for her claims to be true — which they’re not — the secret hacking plot must have begun at least 12 years ago before anyone knew or cared who Joy Reid was. That’s a lie — it’s a childish lie — you’d have to be a moron to believe it — yet she’s telling it.”
Carlson said he found it interesting that NBC News has endorsed her “ludicrous fantasy” as true and is trying to convince other people it’s true.
But he pointed out that NBC executives over the years have made “a habit of lying” — so it’s not entirely surprising.
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