Joy Reid #

Introduction #

Joy Reid, an American political commentator and television host, was fired from MSNBC on February 25, 2025, when the network canceled her 7 p.m. program The ReidOut during a programming overhaul. “Joy Reid is leaving the network and we thank her for her countless contributions over the years,” MSNBC president Rebecca Kutler said in a memo to staff, adding that rotating anchors would host the hour in the coming weeks. Reid’s final show aired Monday, February 24, 2025, ending a five-year run in the slot she took over from Hardball host Chris Matthews in 2020.

Background Information #

Born Joy-Ann Lomena on December 8, 1968, in Brooklyn, New York, Reid was raised mostly in Denver, Colorado; her father was from the Democratic Republic of the Congo and her mother, a college professor and nutritionist, was from Guyana. She graduated from Harvard in 1991, began her journalism career in 1997 in South Florida, and later served as a Miami Herald columnist, The Grio’s managing editor, and editor of the Reid Report blog. She left journalism in 2003 to work with the anti-war group America Coming Together, then worked on Barack Obama’s 2008 presidential campaign.

Reid began hosting at MSNBC in 2014, moving from The Reid Report to AM Joy in 2016, a weekend-morning show averaging nearly one million weekly viewers as of 2018. In July 2020, MSNBC announced Reid would host The ReidOut in the 7 p.m. Eastern slot vacated by Chris Matthews’ March 2020 retirement, making her cable’s first Black female primetime anchor. The New York Times described her as a “heroine” of the anti-Trump “resistance,” and she has written three books, the latest a 2024 biography of civil rights leaders Medgar and Myrlie Evers.

The Controversy or Incident That Led to Their Cancellation #

On February 23, 2025, The New York Times reported that MSNBC had canceled The ReidOut, citing two people familiar with the reshuffling who said the show was being dropped in a lineup shuffle helmed by the network’s new president, Rebecca Kutler. The change followed a management turnover: former MSNBC president Rashida Jones had stepped down about a month earlier after a nearly four-year tenure, and Kutler replaced her. Fox News Digital reported that The ReidOut averaged 973,000 total viewers in February 2025 versus 1.3 million in February 2024, a 28% decline.

The ouster was part of a broader reset rather than a response to any single on-air incident. Fox News described Reid as “infamous for anti-Trump rhetoric and controversial moments,” citing her post-election comments that Black women had lost interest in “saving America” and her comparison of the Trump administration’s deportation efforts to the Holocaust and Hitler’s Germany. Fox also revisited the 2018 episode in which Reid claimed homophobic posts on her old blog were not written by her and blamed hackers, before admitting on air that she was unlikely to have been hacked but did not recall making the remarks. The 2007–2009 posts had cost Reid a planned award from LGBT group PFLAG and her column at The Daily Beast; she called them “insensitive, tone-deaf and dumb,” while the Wayback Machine said it detected no evidence of hacking.

Public Reaction and Consequences #

Rachel Maddow said on her show that Reid’s layoff “feels indefensible” and that “it is a bad mistake to let her walk out the door,” noting that the network’s two nonwhite primetime hosts were both losing their shows. President Trump celebrated the firing on Truth Social, calling Reid “the mentally obnoxious racist” and writing that, based on her “virtually non-existent” ratings, “she should have been ‘canned’ long ago.” In a recorded Zoom interview with the organization Win With Black Women, Reid broke down in tears, saying she had landed on “just gratitude,” and insisted she was “not sorry” for standing up for causes including Black Lives Matter and objecting to the war in Gaza: “I am not sorry I stood up for those things, because those things are of God.”

The shakeup reached beyond Reid’s hour. MSNBC also canceled The Katie Phang Show and José Díaz-Balart Reports, though both hosts remained with the network, and Symone Sanders-Townsend, Alicia Menendez, and Michael Steele, the co-hosts of The Weekend, were set to replace Reid in the 7 p.m. slot. Jen Psaki, a former White House press secretary, was moved to a primetime weekday slot, and Alex Wagner was expected to remain as a correspondent without a primetime program.

Current Status #

When MSNBC confirmed the exit, Reid had already signed off; Kutler’s memo noted her honors, “including most recently, the 2025 NAACP Image Award for Outstanding News Series.” The day before the New York Times report, Reid launched The Joy Reid Show, a YouTube channel, through Image Lab, the production company she co-founded with her husband. The changes came as MSNBC prepared for parent company Comcast’s plan to spin off several NBCUniversal cable networks, including MSNBC, and searched for new leadership in talent, newsgathering, and content strategy.

Impact on Their Career/Life #

The cancellation ended an eleven-year run hosting MSNBC programs and took one of the network’s most high-profile Black women off the air, per NPR, at a time when the Trump administration had made attacks on diversity, equity and inclusion policies. Reid had previously weathered controversy, most notably the 2018 blog-post affair, after which MSNBC publicly stood by her, saying the posts were “obviously hateful and hurtful” but “not reflective of the colleague and friend we have known at MSNBC.” This time she was removed in a ratings-driven restructuring; Fox News observed that she had “emerged as one of the network’s most prominent liberal pundits until her show was canceled.”