Joy Reid made MSNBC history when she became the host of The ReidOut in 2020, taking over the 7:00 p.m. time slot previously held by Hardball for 23 years. However, the show is now being removed from the network’s primetime lineup, as reported by multiple outlets in February 2025.
With the news of these changes, find out more about her below.
1. She Hosted AM Joy Before The ReidOut
Reid hosted the political weekend morning talk show on MSNBC since May 2016 and frequently filled in for other network hosts like Chris Hayes and Rachel Maddow. In 2018, her morning show averaged nearly one million weekly viewers, with loyal fans on social media calling themselves #reiders. The child of immigrants, Reid rose to prominence as a vocal critic of President Donald Trump and became known for her no-nonsense interviews with his surrogates.
““Our prime directive is to constantly remind people that this is not normal and not to allow it to become mundane,” Reid told The New York Times in 2018. “We feel like one of our duties is to keep that story top of mind because it’s fundamentally about whether we truly choose our own leaders.”
After Trump’s 2024 election victory, she lashed out at “right-wingers” during the Thanksgiving holiday, telling The New York Post, “Make your own dinner, MAGA.”
“But if you expect the 73 million who voted for the prosecutor, not the felon and particularly the 92 percent of Black women who voted for Kamala to give you a cookie for your vote, a trophy, a hug, a high-five, you might be asking too much,” she said at the time. “If we want to eat with you, we will. But if we want some peace over the holidays and we don’t want to put up with your trolling while we eat our Tofurky, get over it.”
2. She Took Over Chris Matthews’ Time Slot on the Network
Veteran Hardball anchor Chris Matthews abruptly resigned from the network, on-air, in March 2020. Matthews was forced out after a series of on-air gaffes, including comparing the presidential campaign of Senator Bernie Sanders, who is Jewish, to the Nazi invasion of France during World War II.
Matthews was also accused of making inappropriate and sexist comments to women while at the network. “I’m retiring,” Matthews told viewers in a monologue at the beginning of the March 2 episode. “This is the last Hardball on MSNBC.” It came as a complete shock to his colleagues. Matthews had hosted Hardball since 1997.
3. She Cited Fellow Black Female Journalists Gwen Ifill, Deborah Roberts, and Carole Simpson as Her Heroes
“Evening and prime-time news has been a universe of white men really since I was growing up,” Reid told The New York Times. “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.”
4. She Was Accused of Homophobia in 2018
Posts on Reid’s dormant blog, The Reid Report, speculated that the Republican governor of Florida Charlie Crist was a closeted gay man and married a woman as a coverup. There were also posts that condemned gay sex, degraded lesbians, promoted offensive stereotypes about LGBTQ+ people, and claimed Reid couldn’t watch Brokeback Mountain. The FBI launched an investigation into potential criminal activity on the site, as Reid claimed the site had been hacked.
She apologized on air for what has been found on her blog. “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, have written in the past, why some people don’t believe me,” she said on MSNBC. “For that, I am truly, truly sorry.” She also apologized to Ann Coulter, whom she suggested was a man in several tweets from 2010 and 2011. “I want to apologize to the trans community and to Ann,” she said.
5. She Taught a College Course at Syracuse University’s Communications School
The S.I. Newhouse School Of Public Communications has a program called Newhouse In NYC that allows media students to spend a semester interning and taking classes in New York. Reid taught the “Race, Gender & The Media” course at the school’s midtown satellite campus. The journalist, however, isn’t a Cuse alum. She graduated from Harvard in 1991 with a concentration in film.
