MSNBC Makes It Official: Joy Reid is Replacing Chris Matthews With Weeknight Show The ReidOut

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MSNBC’s Joy Reid is officially moving from the weekend to the weekday.

NBC has confirmed that Reid has been tapped to host a new Washington-based show at 7 p.m. on weeknights, and it will launch on July 20. The show will be called The ReidOut, and Reid will break down and analyze the biggest issues of the day. AM Joy, Reid’s weekend show, will see a rotation of substitute hosts until a permanent replacement is decided.

For weeks, Reid has been a frequent fill-in host for MSNBC’s 7 p.m. slot, but her new permanent gig means her show will officially succeed Chris Matthews’ Hardball. Matthews was pushed out of MSNBC earlier this year amid numerous controversial statements and accusations of sexual harassment.

Here’s a statement Reid gave to The New York Times about her show:

Evening and prime-time news has been a universe of white men really since I was growing up. For somebody who grew up as a nerdy kid obsessed with news, watching ‘Nightline’ and ‘Meet the Press,’ the idea of being a part of that family has always just been kind of overwhelming…I am a Black mom, a Black woman, a Black daughter. I am also a journalist who can conceptualize that pain from a unique point of view. Every day I’m in this job, I’m very conscious of that responsibility to make that collective voice heard. It’s unique to do that as a Black woman.

While Reid has established herself as a progressive-leaning figure with her past analysis and commentary, her career was thrown into question back in 2017 when multiple homophobic posts publicly resurfaced from her old blog. Reid initially claimed those posts were fake and planted by hackers, but her claims fell under intense scrutiny and she eventually made an apologetic statement on the matter but did not directly address whether she had been truthful about the posts and what she had claimed was an FBI investigation.