Joy Reid Is No Longer Filtered—And That’s Exactly The Point

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The legendary journalist has officially entered the independent media game with her latest venture, The Joy Reid Show, where viewers will experience the rawest Reid has been in her career.

Joy Reid and I initially bonded over our credence for Gwen Ifill, the late legendary journalist who hosted PBS NewsHour. I grew up watching Ifill—my father would tune in to PBS 13 New York after my daylong Nickelodeon binge. Reid often cites Ifill as one of her greatest influences.

“When we saw Gwen, we were like, ‘Ooh, stop the presses—we’re going to watch her and we’re going to hear what she has to say,” Reid recalled. “When she moderated that debate—so proud. That was a legendary moment.”

Ifill made history in 1999 as the first African-American woman to host a major political talk show on national television with PBS’ Washington Week. A pioneering milestone that sprung the doors for a new generation of Black women in journalism—including Joy Reid, who would break a respective milestone two decades later.

MEET THE PRESS — Pictured: Joy Reid Host, MSNBC?s ?AM Joy?; MSNBC Political Analyst, appears on ... More "Meet the Press" in Washington, D.C., Sunday, Oct. 1, 2017. (Photo by: William B. Plowman/NBC/NBC Newswire/NBCUniversal via Getty Images)

NBCU Photo Bank/NBCUniversal via Getty Images

In 2020, Reid made history as the first Black woman to anchor a primetime cable news show with The ReidOut, airing weeknights at 7pm EST on MSNBC. Prior, Reid hosted AM Joy, a fiery weekend staple known for its raw political rhetoric. The ReidOut filled the coveted time slot previously held by Chris Matthews’ Hardball—a transition that came amid Joe Biden’s 2020 presidential campaign, the COVID-19 pandemic, and nationwide uprisings for racial justice with the murder of George Floyd. MSNBC needed a voice rooted in rigor and cultural fluency. And, Reid was that voice.

“Wherever you see me, I hope that my legacy is you can trust what I’m saying. Because I'm trying to educate you, inform you, but also not terrify you into submission or silence,” she told me. “You have to know what's happening, but you can't live in constant fear. We say, scaring is caring is kind of the theme song. That’s sort of the theme of ‘The ReidOut.’ It was our theme. We wanted you to know that some of the stuff we're telling you is scary, but we're telling you because we care. And we don't want you to feel afraid. We want you to feel informed.”

2022 MSNBC ELECTION COVERAGE — 2022 Midterms Election Coverage — Pictured: (l-r) Chris Hayes, Joy ... More Reid, Rachel Maddow, Nicolle Wallace, Ari Melber in Studio 3A at Rockefeller Center on Tuesday, November 8, 2022 — (Photo by: Virginia Sherwood/MSNBC via Getty Images)

Virginia Sherwood/MSNBC via Getty Images

There is often a challenge faced by Black journalists upon entering legacy newsrooms: being misinterpreted as “too opinionated” or pigeonholed as a “race reporter.” Yet this lens, often dismissed as niche, is in fact essential to the American narrative. And Joy Reid is uniquely equipped to deliver it. Born in Brooklyn to a Congolese geologist father and a Guyanese nutritionist-turned-professor mother, Reid was raised primarily by her mother. Her insights into global Black identity are not performative. They're personal.

“Inside my mother’s house, it was Guyana—Guyana rules, Guyana discipline,” she told me. “But she understood she was raising African-American kids. So we were both.” That duality has always shaped her journalism. “I'm able to look at the United States the way the world looks at the United States,” she said. Her international lens sharpened during a scholarship trip through Europe, where she and her sister were frequently mistaken for African. “They didn’t believe African-American teenagers could possibly afford to travel outside the U.S.,” she recalled. “People had this warped perception of African-Americans. And we learned that by leaving the United States.”

It’s that lived complexity of being Black, American, Caribbean, and woman that underpins Reid’s voice. Her journalistic beat isn’t race. It’s truth, viewed through a lens shaped by heritage, history, and hard-won clarity.

The pursuit of journalism was not just an opportunity for Reid. She saw journalism as an outlet for advocacy—hence her overall defined journalistic beat in global political affairs like the war on Iraq and Bush, contextualizing voter suppression, or objectively critiquing Trumpism and autocracy. Reid has long been critical of the mainstream media’s reliance on “both-sideism,” especially when it gives extremism an unearned platform. I asked her how journalists should recalibrate objectivity in an era where one—or both—sides can be actively hostile to fact-based truth.

“I used to do a lecture on objectivity, which is this notion we’re all told is the fundamental—it’s the fundamental of journalism. But it hasn’t always been. If you go back to the early 20th century, what objectivity meant were that the people who were 100 percent of the mainstream media—white men—decided what was objective truth. And if you veered away from what they decided was the objective truth, suddenly you were not objective.

“They decided what objectivity meant,” she continued." "They decided who was right, who was wrong, what’s a lynching, what’s a legitimate hanging. They decided that. But people like Ida B. Wells looked at what they were doing and said, wait a minute, hanging George Jones in front of a thousand people in Indianapolis—that’s not a criminal justice act. That’s a murder."

WASHINGTON, DC - JANUARY 20: Joy Reid of MSNBC is host of The ReidOut is photographed at the NBC ... More television station in Washington, DC on January 20, 2022. (Photo by Marvin Joseph/The Washington Post via Getty Images)

The Washington Post via Getty Images

Reid is Ivy-League–educated, having earned a bachelor of arts degree in Film Studies from Harvard. She thanks affirmative action, which was gutted by the Supreme Court in 2023, for her entry into Harvard, citing an understanding of her presence’s valuable contribution to the Ivy-League campus.

“I got admitted to Yale. I got admitted to Brown. I got admitted to Harvard. I got admitted to Vassar. I got admitted to the University of Denver,” Reid told me. “I got to pick which school I went to. And all of them wanted me because of affirmative action.”

“And they looked at all of the smart Black kids in the country with high SAT scores and great grades and said, you know what? We would like to have you make our school more diverse because we realized that being a school full of only white men who come from wealth made our school less rich, less interesting, and less informative and less helpful for our students—because they only learn how to be around other rich white men.”

Since she took on positions in journalism—starting with a role at WSVN in Florida, co-hosting the Wake Up South Florida show, worked on Barack Obama’s 2008 presidential campaign, becoming managing editor at The Grio for three years im 2011, and serving a longtime role as a columnist for The Miami Herald—all while running her blog The Reid Report until her first MSNBC gig in 2014, where her blog transformed into an afternoon news slot on the network. It lasted one year until she landed AM Joy and later the history-making, The ReidOut.

NEW YORK, NY - FEBRUARY 09: Journalist Joy Reid speaks during the Apple Store Soho Presents: Apple ... More Store Soho Presents:Meet the Creator: John Ridley, "American Crime" at the Apple Store Soho on February 9, 2015 in New York City. (Photo by J. Countess/Getty Images)

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In February, the world of political media was shaken when Reid was fired from her historic anchor gig for MSNBC, concluding the broadcast of her show The ReidOut. The cancellation was a result of a grand reprogramming overhaul by the newly appointed network president Rebecca Kutler.

Reid told me that to this day, she hasn’t been given a clear reason for her dismissal from MSNBC. “It was not ratings,” she explained. “We were competitive. Everyone was down after the 2024 election—except Fox.” While the network never offered a direct explanation, she believes it may have stemmed from her frank commentary on Trump and Gaza.

“I get it,” she said. “These media companies—I don’t own them. They can choose who they put on their air.” Rather than dwell on the decision, Reid is focused on what she built while she was there. What she misses most is her team. “I loved my ReidOut team and my coworkers,” she said.

Her main critique isn’t about her own firing—it’s about how MSNBC handled the aftermath. “I’ve never known MSNBC to devastate the staff when they take out a host,” she noted. “I had three shows there. Even when one was canceled or I left to take another, no staff was ever moved or laid off.” She echoed Rachel Maddow’s public disapproval of how it was handled, calling it “divisive” and “damaging to the joy people had in working there.”

Here’s the beautiful thing: Joy Reid is now operating in true journalistic freedom. No corporate optics. No editorial gatekeepers. While she’s always been unapologetic, we’re now witnessing her at her rawest—and most liberated. In May, she made her independent media debut on YouTube with The Joy Reid Show, where “Reiders” get daily breakdowns of news, politics, and culture with unfiltered clarity.

Reid’s YouTube channel hit the 100k subscriber milestone last week—a sign that not only did Reid carry her dedicated audience along her independent journey, but she remains a authoritative voice in American media.

“I was pretty unapologetic,” Reid told me. “And it’s probably why I don’t work in corporate media anymore... There are limits placed on you just by the structure of what it is.” She explained that traditional newsrooms, bound by legal departments, government scrutiny, and internal policies, often force journalists to speak through layers of caution. “But now,” she added, “I’m regulated by my viewers—the people who choose to subscribe. That is who my bosses are. That’s the only boss I have other than myself.”

That shift from institutional control to community accountability isn’t just liberating. It’s revolutionary. Reid has also reprised her Substack, where Reiders can retrieve in-depth narratives of modern happenings and exclusive interviews with cultural figures from Ava DuVernay to Ta-Nehisi Coates. Reid joins the likes of Don Lemon, Katie Couric and Mehdi Hasan who have gone on to launch their own media platforms post their unique departures from corporate media. That shift from institutional control to community accountability isn’t just liberating. It’s revolutionary.

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