Joy Reid

Some Lesser Known Facts About Joy Reid

• Joy Reid grew up in Denver, Colorado.

• Her father was from the Democratic Republic of the Congo, and her mother was from Guyana.

• Her parents met when they were studying at the University of Iowa.

• Joy Reid was raised in the Methodist faith.

• Her father returned to Congo after his divorce from her mother.

• When she was 17 years old, her mother died of breast cancer.

  

• After that, Joy Reid moved to Flatbush, Brooklyn, to live with her aunt.

• During her college days, she felt a big change in her life. She went from living in a mostly Black community to one where only six per cent of the people were African American.

• Joy Reid learned to live with new people and take care of herself.

• She paid her bills and college fees while studying at Harvard which helped her grow and become independent.

• In 1997, Joy Reid moved from New York to South Florida to work on a morning show at WSVN Channel 7.

• From 2000 to 2004, she worked as an internet news producer/editor at NBC News.

• From 2000 to 2014, Joy Reid worked as an editor of The Reid Report blog.

• In 2003, she left journalism, and in 2004, she began working as a deputy state communications director at America Coming Together, which opposed the Iraq War and George W. Bush.

• In 2003, Joy Reid was a Knight Center for Specialized Journalism fellow.

• She then worked as a part-time political columnist for the Miami Herald.

• From 2006 to 2007, Joy Reid worked as a co-host and producer at Radio One. She co-hosted a morning show called Wake Up South Florida on WTPS in Miami with James T. Thomas.

• She then worked on Barack Obama’s 2008 presidential campaign.

  

• In 2006, Joy Reid joined The South Florida Times as a contributing writer.

• She worked as a managing editor at TheGrio.com, MSNBC, in New York, United States, from July 2011 to February 2014.

• Joy Reid worked part-time at Imagelab Media Group from 2005 to January 2015 in Miami, Florida, and New York City.

• From January 2010 to January 2015, she worked as an op-ed columnist at The Miami Herald in Miami/Fort Lauderdale.

• From 2011 to 2014, Joy Reid was the managing editor of The Grio.

• In February 2014, she began working as a host for the news show The Reid Report on MSNBC. She worked in the role till February 2015.

  

• In February 2015, Joy Reid was promoted to the position of national correspondent at MSNBC.

• In 2015, she gave the first Ida B. Wells lecture at Wake Forest University.

• In May 2016, Joy Reid began hosting AM Joy, a political weekend morning talk show on MSNBC.

• In 2016, The Hollywood Reporter, an American digital and print magazine, praised her for making complex issues easy to understand.

• In 2017, Joy Reid became the most-tweeted journalist and ranked fourth among the top-tweeted news outlets on Twitter.

• In 2017 and 2018, old blog posts from Joy Reid’s blog (written between 2007 and 2009) appeared again on Twitter. The articles mocked politicians and journalists using gay stereotypes. Soon, Reid apologized and called the posts insensitive, tone-deaf, and dumb.

• In some other articles, Joy Reid wrote things like kissing between men was gross and expressed views against same-sex marriage.

• In one post, she was questioned if she was homophobic, and she then replied ‘Probably.’

• Joy Reid claimed that she did not remember writing those posts. After that, she hired lawyers to see if her blog had been hacked. However, the Wayback Machine claimed that it found no signs of hacking.

• In 2018, her show gained more than one million viewers every Saturday.

• In 2018, The New York Times described Joy Reid as a leading voice against Donald Trump and called her a heroine of the opposition.

• The same year, Joy Reid was nominated for three NABJ Salute to Excellence Awards.

• The nominations were for covering a pastor pulled to safety at the Charlottesville march, reporting on hurricane damage in the U.S. Virgin Islands, and a segment on The Kalief Browder Story, which won her an award.

• In 2018, when her old blog posts appeared online, the LGBTQ+ group PFLAG cancelled plans to give her an award.

• The Daily Beast also stopped publishing her columns and published a report which claimed that her blog was not hacked.

• On 28 April 2018, Joy Reid apologized on her show AM Joy, but the reactions were mostly split by political views.

• After that, her old articles from 2005 to 2007 showed her support and conspiracy theories that made controversial remarks about Jewish people and Israel.

• In the articles, Joy Reid criticized Wolf Blitzer for showing partiality toward Israel and claimed that bar/bat mitzvahs cost Jewish families around half a million dollars.

• The Zionist Organization of America then asked MSNBC to fire Joy Reid for spreading anti-Semitic ideas.

• Another blog article from 2007 showed a photoshopped image of Senator John McCain’s face on the body of the Virginia Tech shooter.

• In June 2018, Joy Reid gave a formal apology in which she said that she regretted her past views and had grown since then.

• MSNBC took her side and said that the posts were hurtful but not a reflection of the person she had become over the years.

• Joy Reid began working as a host of the news show The ReidOut on MSNBC in July 2020 in Washington DC.

  

• When she became the host of The ReidOut, she became the first Black woman to anchor a primetime cable news show.

• Her show The ReidOut replaced Hardball and aired at 7 p.m. Eastern time.

• In 2019, she published the book The Man Who Sold America: Trump and the Unraveling of the American Story.

  

• On 1 September 2020, Joy Reid said on her show that Donald Trump’s refusal to condemn Kyle Rittenhouse could be seen as encouraging violence.

• She compared it to how the media talked about Muslim leaders who promote violence and said that there was a double standard.

• Civil rights groups and politicians like Ilhan Omar and Rashida Tlaib criticized her comments as Islamophobic and asked for an apology.

• Commentator Jennifer Rubin defended Reid and said that she was pointing out media partiality, not supporting it.

• In 2024, Joy Reid created the term ‘KHive’ for Kamala Harris supporters.

• The same year, she released the book titled Medgar and Myrlie: Medgar Evers and the Love Story That Awakened America.

  

• On 23 February 2025, The New York Times reported that MSNBC had cancelled The ReidOut. The show’s final episode aired on 24 February 2025.

• Joy Reid often teaches a class at Syracuse University in Manhattan about race, gender, and the media.

• She has been featured on the cover of many noted magazines.

  

• Joy Reid is often spotted enjoying alcoholic beverages on various occasions.