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MSNBC Host Joy Reid Claims Hackers Responsible For Anti-Gay Blog Posts

By Robert Jonathan
Published on: 08:02 PST, Apr 24, 2018

Past homophobic content found on Joy Reid’s blog is back in the news. Joy Reid is the liberal pundit who hosts the political talk show AM Joy on MSNBC on weekends from 10 a.m. to noon Eastern, and enjoys a following among the anti-Trump #Resistance movement.

In December 2017, Reid issued a lengthy apology about unearthed blog posts that she wrote about Florida politician Charlie Crist, the ex-governor and current congressman, a former Republican and independent who is now a Democrat, in which she apparently implied that he was a closeted gay man. Reid authored the material about 10 years ago when she was a Florida political blogger and talk show host.

[See Updates below]

Additional blog posts have now surfaced, Mediaite has reported, which Reid claims were not written by her, run counter to her belief system, and were fabricated to harm her reputation, in an exclusive statement provided to Mediaite.

“[T]he MSNBC host claims these posts from The Reid Report — which include defending homophobia, gay jokes, and the outright mocking of gay people and homosexuality — were somehow put in by an ‘external party’ that “manipulated material from my now-defunct blog”… These anti-gay articles from The Reid Report, a site that pre-dated Reid’s former MSNBC show of the same name, were originally shared on Twitter by user Jamie_Maz who found them using the Wayback Machine…”

An avowed supporter of the LGBTQ community, Reid added that she hired a cybersecurity expert to find out who corrupted the now offline site and has also notified the feds about what happened.

Mediaite continued its discussion about the posts in question, implying that the explanation may not completely hold up.

“While the amateur sleuth provided Mediaite with legitimate links to all of the posts they tweeted screenshots of, neither the actual defunct site nor its archived pages are currently accessible, as their Wayback Machine links mysteriously disappeared in December…It is worth noting, however, that Reid does admit these posts came from her blog — rather than alleging they are doctored images posted to Twitter — with the caveat that they were added by nefarious hackers after she had the site shut down. It’s unclear when the nefarious hackers would have hacked her site and added the controversial content, since it has been defunct for years and still is. More importantly, NBC could or would not specify exactly which posts Reid is claiming were doctored.”

As alluded to above, NBC/MSNBC has not issued a statement about this matter yet.

Journalist Glenn Greenwald of The Intercept, and Edward Snowden fame, has insisted that liberal news outlets are ignoring the Joy Reid hacking allegations for ideological reasons, which will probably take Reid off the hook. “Reid’s ideology is in accordance with theirs, and they therefore don’t care if she’s lying or telling the truth when denying authorship of these bigoted articles, nor do they care about the anti-LGBT bigotry itself.”

“The biggest part of the story is the veracity of her remarkable claim — that she’s making not ten years ago but now — that it was hackers who wrote the offensive material under her name,” he also observed about the Joy Reid blog controversy.

The Internet Archive, which operates the Wayback Machine, addressed the Joy Reid hacking claim today.

“…When we reviewed the archives, we found nothing to indicate tampering or hacking of the Wayback Machine versions. At least some of the examples of allegedly fraudulent posts provided to us had been archived at different dates and by different entities. We let Reid’s lawyers know that the information provided was not sufficient for us to verify claims of manipulation…”

Parenthetically, Trump foe Joy Reid has repeatedly denounced alleged Russian meddling in the 2016 election. It turned out, though, that she was the favorite pundit of Russian trolls who retweeted her the most, based on an analysis of the Robert Mueller indictment of 13 Russian nationals and three Russian companies in February.

Updates:

“LGBTQ group PFLAG has rescinded an award honoring MSNBC host Joy Reid amid a growing backlash to anti-gay blog posts that appeared on Reid’s old blog. PFLAG was poised to honor Reid with the group’s annual ‘Straight for Equality in Media’ award in May but reversed that decision on Tuesday after Reid’s explanation for the posts appeared to fall apart,” The Daily Caller reported.

There continues to be a lot of skepticism on social media about Joy Reid’s explanation.

Fox News claims that more material allegedly has emerged.

“Meanwhile, additional homophobic slurs from Reid’s past have surfaced – this time from her Twitter account. Mediaite even unearthed a 2016 tweet in which Reid joked about removing damaging information from the Wayback Machine. MSNBC’s biggest star, Rachel Maddow, is openly gay and the blog posts include insults directed at Maddow.”

The executive editor of The Daily Beast, a liberal website, has announced that it is suspending future columns that were to be written by Joy Reid, describing it as a “pause,” pending an investigation, The Wrap reported.

In the video below, FNC host Tucker Carlson implies that NBC is enabling Joy Reid, “an icon on the progressive left,” in what he deemed a “ludicrous fantasy” about retroactive hacking.

MSNBC host Joy Reid makes a qualified apology in the clip below.

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