MSNBC tried to stop Joy Reid from expressing herself on social media before ultimately firing her from its primetime lineup.
Her MSNBC bosses were “horrified” by the way she used social media platforms like Twitter, she told Katie Couric on her new podcast Monday. “And anytime I would tweet anything, I would get calls—I would get, ‘Please get off Twitter, we hate it.’”
“They just don’t like that it pulls their talent and their reporters out of their control because now you’re not running what you’re tweeting through Standards and Practices,” Reid continued. “It’s giving your personality directly to the audience, which they don’t like because it’s no longer managed and curated by them.”
Reid is gearing up to launch her YouTube show and podcast “The Joy Reid Show” on June 9, but she got candid about her time at MSNBC a week in advance during a preview conversation with Couric, which she also uploaded to YouTube after hosting the livestream on her website.
Her comments come after MSNBC canceled Reid’s primetime show The ReidOut without explanation in February, as part of a network shakeup following Donald Trump’s election win that resulted in the exodus of several of the network’s non-white anchors.
Former MSNBC host Keith Olbermann characterized the moves as “an MSNBC purge so brutally racist it makes you think it was done by [Elon] Musk.”
Reid opened up about The ReidOut’s end when Couric asked her what “really happened” on Monday. “I’ve been asked this so many times,” she told Couric. “And people think that I’m just saying it to B.S., but I’m being honest with you—I don’t know.” Just before she found out the news, Reid said, “We were emailing back and forth with the PR department, praising our win for the NAACP Image Award.”
“It wasn’t ratings” that got the show canceled, Reid went on, “because we had just had a ratings meeting a couple of weeks before that talking about the fact that our show… other than Rachel Maddow, we were down the least” after Trump’s election win. The Daily Beast reported in March that Reid’s ratings were actually increasing when she was let go.
“We were just told that we were doing… that we were holding on pretty well,” she continued. “And then, you know, it’s not like the ratings have gotten better since I’ve been gone.”
Reid also said the way she was told that her show was canceled felt “scripted” and “just very perfunctory.”
“I wasn’t told ‘The ratings were terrible,’ ‘It’s something you did,’ ‘You tweeted a terrible thing,’” she said, adding that she was already being “extra careful” online at the time, since “there was a real anxiety about social media.”
Reid she doesn’t necessarily think her show was canceled because of her outspoken criticism of Trump, as many of her fans have speculated—but she said there’s one reason she’s not completely ruling it out.
“I’m a Black woman doing the thing. You know what I mean? And so I’m not different” from MSNBC hosts and Trump critics Rachel Maddow or Nicole Wallace, but “I think that there’s a difference for Trump in hearing the kinds of criticisms, specifically, out of a Black woman. It bothers him in a way it doesn’t bother him like anything else.”
“There’s a fear of him,” she also said, “We’re seeing it everywhere.”
