In the ongoing controversy about anti-LGBT content, MSNBC is standing by host Joy Reid and has even brought in the FBI to investigate the supposed hacking of her old site. This is likely being done as a stalling strategy. MSNBC and Reid are obviously hoping the story will fade over time.
Reid’s bigger problem is that she is facing a crisis of disbelief from her fellow travelers on the left.
Alexis C. Madrigal writes at The Atlantic:
The Evidence Is Not With Joy ReidThe triumph of the gay-rights movement has been so complete and fast that it’s easy to forget that 10 years ago—in the same election that swept Barack Obama to the White House—California voters passed a state constitutional amendment banning same-sex marriage. Attitudes changed, the moral arc bent, and now, a lot fewer people disparage gay people like this than did in 2006. A liberal talk-show host would and should be embarrassed and ashamed by these posts popping up, but Reid apologized once, and could have done so again.Instead, Reid released a statement to Mediaite saying that she’d been hacked and was not responsible for the posts. “In December I learned that an unknown, external party accessed and manipulated material from my now-defunct blog, The Reid Report, to include offensive and hateful references that are fabricated and run counter to my personal beliefs and ideology,” Reid said.The posts had been dug up on the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine, which maintains copies of many pages on the web. When Reid said she’d been hacked, many jumped to the conclusion that it was the Wayback Machine that had been hacked. On its blog, the Internet Archive said that Reid’s lawyers had contacted them about a possible hack, but that they had no indication that one had occurred.
At another liberal site the Daily Beast, Kevin Poulsen also voices skepticism:
Claims by Joy Reid’s Cybersecurity Expert Fall ApartMSNBC host Joy Reid claims that recently unearthed homophobic articles attributed to her are fakes. And she says a cybersecurity consultant has proof that her old blog has been hacked.But that consultant, Jonathan Nichols, had trouble producing the promised evidence. And what he did produce failed to withstand scrutiny, according to a Daily Beast analysis. Blog posts that Nichols claimed do not appear on the Internet Archive are, in fact, there. The indicators of hacked posts don’t bear out…“We have both evidence of fraudulent posts and evidence of screenshot manipulation,” Nichols told The Daily Beast on Wednesday.Except, that wasn’t quite so.To support the screenshot forgery allegation, Nichols pointed to six images in the @Jamie_Maz Twitter timeline that he said were definitely not written by Reid nor posted by a hacker, but instead were outright fabricated images of posts that never appeared on the site. “The most obvious one was an instance where—it’s an easy one, it’ll stick in your head— [@Jamie_Maz] says Joy made statements about Eddie Murphy. It’s obviously false, she never made that claim.”Nichols said those six posts are nowhere to be found in the Internet Archive. But that is not true.
Even the Huffington Post, the cherished publication of the American left is having doubts. Hayley Miller writes:
Joy Reid’s Hacking Claims Look Increasingly UnlikelyJoy Reid claims a recent batch of screenshots appearing to show homophobic statements on her now-defunct blog are “fraudulent” and the result of a cyberattack.However, several aspects of the cyberattack claim seem highly questionable.The host of MSNBC’s “AM Joy” came under fire this week after a Twitter user shared screenshots of anti-LGBTQ content Reid had seemingly written between 2005 and 2009 for her old blog, The Reid Report.Reid apologized in December for writing homophobic posts about former Florida Gov. Charlie Crist (D) between 2007 and 2009 after Twitter user @Jamie_Maz shared screenshots of the posts…The Library of Congress, which uses a local installation of the Wayback Machine, contains the disputed posts, CNN reported Tuesday. Archive.today, another archiving site, also contained the posts, HuffPost discovered.
Dear Joy, when you’ve lost the HuffPo…
You know who else doesn’t believe Joy Reid’s hacking claims? Joy Reid. She admits there’s not proof, but says she doesn’t think she wrote the words.
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