Joy Reid will stay on air at MSNBC amid outcry over alleged anti-gay posts By Jason Schwartz and Cristiano Lima (politico.com) / April 25 2018
Popular MSNBC host Joy Reid will remain on the air amid a controversy over what appear to be old posts expressing anti-gay views on her now-defunct personal blog, an NBC spokesperson said.
Reid says her blog was hacked to include the posts, which are dated in the mid- to late-2000s and resurfaced last week when Twitter user @Jamie_Maz and Mediaite highlighted them.
The NBC spokesperson, who declined to be named, said Reid has referred the matter to law enforcement and that the network would wait for that process to play out before taking any action.
NBC representatives declined to say whether the network itself will investigate the posts. Reid did not reply immediately to a request for comment. Neither did the FBI, though it does not typically confirm or deny investigations.
Reid hosts a two-hour show on MSNBC on Saturday and Sunday mornings, though her status as a hero to the left has given her a larger profile. The alleged remarks, however, have prompted fierce backlash. PFLAG National, an LGBT advocacy group, rescinded Reid’s Straight for Equality in Media award on Tuesday.
As outrage over the posts spreads, NBC seems caught in the middle. On Tuesday night, network representatives forwarded a statement from a “cyber-security expert” hired by Reid, supporting her claim that the posts on her former blog, The Reid Report, were the work of hackers. The representatives also included letters her lawyers sent to Google and the Internet Archive in December, asking them to wipe the offending posts.
NBC has not issued a statement on the record about the controversy, however.
The alleged blog posts include language critical of gay marriage and claims that homosexual men prey on “impressionable teens” — messages at odds with Reid’s reputation as a progressive media leader. The posts also take aim at Rachel Maddow, now MSNBC’s star prime-time host, for having views on gay rights “at the left-most end of the political spectrum.”
“Most straight people cringe at the sight of two men kissing,” one of the posts reads. “The nature of political correctness is that gay people are allowed to say straight sex is gross but the reverse is considered to be patently homophobic.”
Reid first came under scrutiny late last year over similar remarks on her blog from 2007 to 2009, which she has acknowledged making. The host mockingly speculated about the sexuality of then-Florida Gov. Charlie Crist and referred to him as “Miss Charlie.” In December, she apologized, saying the remarks did not reflect her views.
“This note is my apology to all who are disappointed by the content of blogs I wrote a decade ago, for which my choice of words and tone have legitimately been criticized,” Reid said at the time.
In the last week, though, additional posts on Reid’s old blog were surfaced by Twitter user @Jamie_Maz, who also found the posts about Crist. Reid’s blog is no longer online, and she has said that she shuttered it in 2011. The offending posts were found via Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine, which archives website screenshots.
This time, Reid is fighting back against the allegations. On Monday, Reid claimed that hackers were responsible for inserting the newly discovered posts into the archive, issuing a statement to Mediaite saying that an “external party accessed and manipulated material from my now-defunct blog, The Reid Report, to include offensive and hateful references that are fabricated and run counter to my personal beliefs and ideology.”
Internet Archive disputed that its records had been compromised in a blog post on Tuesday. 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, NBC representatives relayed the statement from Reid’s outside cybersecurity expert, Jonathan Nichols.
“We discovered that login information used to access the blog was available on the Dark Web and that fraudulent entries — featuring offensive statements — were entered with suspicious formatting and time stamps. The posts included hate speech targeting marginalized communities and Ms. Reid has been explicit in condemning them,” Nichols said in the statement.
It is unclear how the posts to her blog could have been changed without the Internet Archive being manipulated. Nichols did not specify which posts he believed were altered.
https://www.politico.com/story/2018/04/25/joy-reid-anti-gay-posts-550213
