The Media Yawns at Homophobic Posts on Joy Reid’s Blog…Now Imagine If It Were Hannity

An old blog of MSNBC host Joy Reid has come back to haunt her (again).

Back in December, Mediaite reported about numerous posts from her blog The Reid Report attacking former Florida governor Charlie Crist, accusing him of being gay. Shortly after, Reid issued an apology to both Crist and the LGBT community. Now the Wayback Machine, an Internet archiving service that takes screenshots of websites, managed to preserve a trove of homophobic articles supposedly authored by Reid. In an article defending the homophobic remarks of an NBA player, she appears to admit that she is “probably” homophobic too. In another article, her site posted her “totally not gay celebrities of the year” which included CNN’s Anderson Cooper and singer Clay Aiken, neither of whom were public about their sexual orientation at the time. Other public figures she either seems to have mocked or accused of being gay include Supreme Court Justice John Roberts, Oprah Winfrey, Gayle King, Heath Ledger, former President George W. Bush, former Vice President Dick Cheney, Senator John McCain, and Mediaite founder Dan Abrams.

Instead of owning up to these bigoted posts like she did about governor-turned-congressman Crist, Reid claimed she learned back in December that an “external party accessed and manipulated material” from her old blog and that those articles were “fabricated.” The Wayback Machine pushed back against Reid’s assertions, stating they “found nothing to indicate tampering or hacking of the Wayback Machine versions.” Then late Tuesday, NBC circulated a lengthy statement from Reid’s cyber security consultant Jonathan Nichols insisting that Reid’s blog was in fact infiltrated without actually sharing any evidence.

Which begs the question; did these hackers also infiltrate her Twitter account? Because not only does she have homophobic tweets, she also made several transphobic tweets when referring to conservative commentator Ann Coulter numerous times as a “dude.”

Either this is arguably the most elaborate scheme to try to take down a TV personality ever… or Joy Reid actually did write all of those homophobic posts, and she and NBC tried to cover it up in thoroughly embarrassing fashion.

There really hasn’t been much reaction to Reid’s documented homophobia. Articles have been written by The New York Times and Fox News‘ websites, but the news has virtually gone ignored on-air by the cable networks. And some in the media are coming to her defense, including CNN’s Jeffrey Toobin who called her an “important and valuable voice.”

Now let’s compare the lack of outrage that’s been aimed at Reid to the plenty of outrage that’s been aimed at another cable news host in recent weeks: Sean Hannity.

Sean Hannity has been making headlines in large part to Michael Cohen, President Donald Trump‘s scandal-plagued personal lawyer who revealed in court recently that the Fox News host was his mysterious third client and has also gotten attention for his reported real estate empire as well as his coziness with the president with some suggesting he’s the “unofficial chief of staff.”

The story received blanket coverage on Fox’s cable news rivals at MSNBC and CNN. NBC’s Chuck Todd and CNN’s Anderson Cooper blasted Fox News for their lack of response to the revelation that Hannity was Cohen’s client as the primetime host was mercilessly mocked by the late-night comedians. Some even called for his firing over it. And ironically, Joy Reid spent nearly 15 straight minutes of her show this past weekend dedicated to Hannity and expressed fear that he was some sort of “shadow president.”

And over the years, the left-leaning watchdog group Media Matters has launched countless ad boycott campaigns against Hannity for various reasons from pushing conspiracy theories to simply being a “propagandist” for the Trump administration.

Now one could argue that for a variety of reasons Hannity’s issue was more “newsworthy” but just imagine if Mediaite discovered that Sean Hannity had an old blog filled with horrifically bigoted articles. CNN and MSNBC would rip him to shreds, Media Matters would organize another ad boycott against him. The calls for his firing would be deafening.

So why the double standard? Is it the fact that one is a conservative on Fox News who’s a staunch Trump supporter while the other is a liberal on MSNBC and champion of the #Resistance?

Think about how the media would react if these posts existed on Hannity’s old blog and most importantly, if he gave the absurd explanation she and NBC have for the existence of such posts.

It’s that simple.

[image via screengrab]

This is an opinion piece. The views expressed in this article are those of just the author.