Joy Reid Slams Laura Ingraham: ‘Fox News Has Decided The Grist For the Ratings Mill is Black People’
MSNBC’s Joy Reid held a lengthy segment on her Sunday show to take on Fox News’ Laura Ingraham, who has been engaged in a back and forth with LeBron James over whether the NBA star is allowed to voice his political opinion.
Ingraham took aim at LeBron earlier this week over his criticisms of President Donald Trump, instructing the Cavs player to “shut up and dribble.”
AM Joy’s panel held a discussion of the feud between the basketball player and the Fox News host, with Beat DC editor Tiffany Ross defending LeBron’s right to express his political views.
“I think what Laura Ingraham did was highlight her own ignorance,” Ross said. “There’s been a long, rich tradition of athletes weighing in on political issues. This is the same woman who would have told Muhammad Ali to shut up and fight when was protesting the Vietnam war.”
“There is this extent to which Fox News has decided that the grist for the ratings mill is black people,” Reid added. “Black NFL players, black NBA players.”
“You had Eminem make a music video attacking Donald Trump — that’s not interesting to them. The grist is always black and brown people, because they know that it sells.” (Editor’s note: For the record, Fox News did cover Eminem’s music video. I remember. I had to watch all of it.)
Reid then played a video of Ingraham’s defense of her LeBron comments against criticism that she was being racist. Ingraham countered her critics by pointing out that she has used the “shut up and x” line against people throughout her career, regardless of ethnicity.
Reid argued that the Fox News host is being willfully ignorant of the undertones of her comments.
“All they do all day and all night is find black people to put on TV and say, point and point and point and look at them,” she said.
“They’re panicked,” said Eric Boehlert, a writer at progressive news website Shareblue. “The last eight days they don’t want to talk about a wife-beater in the White House, they don’t want to talk about another mistress being paid off.”
“So they have to expand the reach for the outrage, and they end up sounding like a chatroom from Stormfront, and any of these white nationalist sites.”
Watch above, via MSNBC.
[image via screengrab]
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