More Joy Reid Blog Drama

Joy Reid

MSNBC host Joy Reid encouraged readers of her now-defunct blog to watch an infamous 9/11 conspiracy documentary, according to recently discovered posts shared with BuzzFeed News.

A March 22, 2006, post to her weblog, Reidblog, archived by the Wayback Machine and titled “The official story,” links to Loose Change 9/11, a viral 80-minute web video originally released in 2005. Loose Change, which was produced in part by Infowars’ Alex Jones, alleged that the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center were in fact planned by the US government. The central claims in Loose Change have been widely debunked.

“The fundamental question is: do you believe the official story of 9/11?” the post reads. “If you do, great. If you don't, then everything that happened after that is called into serious question. Even if you're agnostic, or you tend to believe that al-Qaida attacked the World Trade Center and Pentagon and that the government had no warning such a thing could happen, it's worth taking a second look.”

Neither Reid nor MSNBC responded to requests for comment.

Reid has come under fire over the past six months after internet researchers surfaced other posts from the blog, several of which are anti-gay. The AM Joy host initially apologized for the posts last December, but in April claimed that hackers had inserted separate anti-gay posts into her decade-old blog. But the rising progressive star was forced to admit that she could not substantiate this claim after news reports called into question the validity of the evidence her private cybersecurity expert provided.

Since Tuesday, after ABC canceled Roseanne Barr's hit show following her racist tweet, MSNBC has faced renewed pressure from conservatives to address the Reid situation, particularly after Reid discussed the Roseanne controversy on air.

That pressure from the political right looks poised to continue. According to a person familiar with the matter, Fox News' Tucker Carlson Wednesday discussed other newly uncovered blog posts, concerning Reid's views on immigration.


It wasn’t that long ago that Reid stirred up a controversy of her own because of things she wrote on social media. A Twitter user uncovered blog posts and other tweets authored by Reid more than a decade ago that slammed gay marriage, accused people of being gay who had not come out as such, made suggestions that certain politicians had engaged in homosexual acts with each other, and other homophobic remarks.

Reid apologized in December when some of the first blog posts were uncovered. But when more were exposed in April, she didn’t apologize. Instead, she claimed the posts were not written by her, but rather they were the work of a hacker who gained access to her site.