Joy Reid Is No Longer Filtered-And That’s Exactly The Point

The legendary journalist has officially entered the independent media game with her latest venture, The Joy Reid Show, where viewers will experience the rawest Reid has been in her career.

Joy Reid and I initially bonded over our credence for Gwen Ifill, the late legendary journalist who hosted PBS NewsHour. I grew up watching Ifill—my father would tune in to PBS 13 New York after my daylong Nickelodeon binge. Reid often cites Ifill as one of her greatest influences.

“When we saw Gwen, we were like, ‘Ooh, stop the presses—we’re going to watch her and we’re going to hear what she has to say,” Reid recalled. “When she moderated that debate—so proud. That was a legendary moment.”

Ifill made history in 1999 as the first African-American woman to host a major political talk show on national television with PBS’ Washington Week. A pioneering milestone that sprung the doors for a new generation of Black women in journalism—including Joy Reid, who would break a respective milestone two decades later.

In 2020, Reid made history as the first Black woman to anchor a primetime cable news show with The ReidOut, airing weeknights at 7pm EST on MSNBC. Prior, Reid hosted AM Joy, a fiery weekend staple known for its raw political rhetoric. The ReidOut filled the coveted time slot previously held by Chris Matthews’ Hardball—a transition that came amid Joe Biden’s 2020 presidential campaign, the COVID-19 pandemic, and nationwide uprisings for racial justice with the murder of George Floyd. MSNBC needed a voice rooted in rigor and cultural fluency. And, Reid was that voice.

“Wherever you see me, I hope that my legacy is you can trust what I’m saying. Because I’m trying to educate you, inform you, but also not terrify you into submission or silence,” she told me. “You have to know what’s happening, but you can’t live in constant fear.

We say, scaring is caring is kind of the theme song. That’s sort of the theme of ‘The ReidOut.’ It was our theme. We wanted you to know that some of the stuff we’re telling you is scary, but we’re telling you because we care. And we don’t want you to feel afraid. We want you to feel informed.”

There is often a challenge faced by Black journalists upon entering legacy newsrooms: being misinterpreted as “too opinionated” or pigeonholed as a “race reporter.” Yet this lens, often dismissed as niche, is in fact essential to the American narrative. And Joy Reid is uniquely equipped to deliver it. Born in Brooklyn to a Congolese geologist father and a Guyanese nutritionist-turned-professor mother, Reid was raised primarily by her mother. Her insights into global Black identity are not performative. They’re personal.

“Inside my mother’s house, it was Guyana—Guyana rules, Guyana discipline,” she told me. “But she understood she was raising African-American kids. So we were both.” That duality has always shaped her journalism. “I’m able to look at the United States the way the world looks at the United States,” she said. Her international lens sharpened during a scholarship trip through Europe, where she and her sister were frequently mistaken for African. “They didn’t believe African-American teenagers could possibly afford to travel outside the U.S.,” she recalled. “People had this warped perception of African-Americans. And we learned that by leaving the United States.”

It’s that lived complexity of being Black, American, Caribbean, and woman that underpins Reid’s voice. Her journalistic beat isn’t race. It’s truth, viewed through a lens shaped by heritage, history, and hard-won clarity.

The pursuit of journalism was not just an opportunity for Reid. She saw journalism as an outlet for advocacy—hence her overall defined journalistic beat in global political affairs like the war on Iraq and Bush, contextualizing voter suppression, or objectively critiquing Trumpism and autocracy. Reid has long been critical of the mainstream media’s reliance on “both-sideism,” especially when it gives extremism an unearned platform. I asked her how journalists should recalibrate objectivity in an era where one—or both—sides can be actively hostile to fact-based truth.

“I used to do a lecture on objectivity, which is this notion we’re all told is the fundamental—it’s the fundamental of journalism. But it hasn’t always been. If you go back to the early 20th century, what objectivity meant were that the people who were 100 percent of the mainstream media—white men—decided what was objective truth. And if you veered away from what they decided was the objective truth, suddenly you were not obje