The internet is FOREVER, as MSNBC hostess Joy Reid is learning.
Reid usually makes headlines for the…interesting things she suggests, most recently fantasizing about a scenario in which President Trump evades arrest by federal authorities and is dragged kicking and screaming from the White House.
In any case, before she ascended to MSNBC, Joy Reid had a blog called the Reid Report.
Back in December, some of Reid’s old posts surfaced and she apologized, saying, “It was insensitive, tone deaf and dumb. There is no excusing it – not based on the taste-skewing mores of talk radio or the then-blogosphere, and not based on my intentions.”
Those posts included suggestions that then-Florida Governor Charlie Crist was gay, frequently referring to him as “Miss Charlie.”
Mediaite had the story then:
MSNBC’s Joy Reid has apologized for old posts of hers containing homophobic remarks.As Mediaite reported yesterday, Reid repeatedly mocked then-Florida Governor Charlie Crist as a closeted gay man who she nicknamed “Miss Charlie.”“Now that he’s married to a girl,” she wrote in one such post, “Charlie Crist is being sought out for all KINDS of good stuff… [The GOP] are wooing Miss Charlie to run.”In a statement provided to Mediaite, Reid apologized and said, “At no time have I intentionally sought to demean or harm the LGBT community, which includes people whom I deeply love. My goal, in my ham-handed way, was to call out potential hypocrisy.”
But the internet is forever and so more posts have bubbled up to the surface.
Mediaite obtained screenshots of the now-defunct Reid Report which contained blog post content well outside the bounds of progressive scripture, most notably, content unflattering to the LGBTQ[and whatever other letters go here] community again. Reid’s old site is no longer up and running, nor can it be found in the archives. “neither the actual defunct site nor its archived pages are currently accessible, as their Wayback Machine links mysteriously disappeared in December after Mediaite‘s initial story on Reid’s homophobic comments about Florida Congressman Charlie Crist was published,” writes Mediaite.
So far, there’s no mea culpa from Reid. Nope. This time, she’s blaming hackers or some other nefarious force for manipulating old blog posts to make her look bad.
Reid provided the following statement to Mediaite:
“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.I began working with a cyber-security expert who first identified the unauthorized activity, and we notified federal law enforcement officials of the breach. The manipulated material seems to be part of an effort to taint my character with false information by distorting a blog that ended a decade ago.Now that the site has been compromised I can state unequivocally that it does not represent the original entries. I hope that whoever corrupted the site recognizes the pain they have caused, not just to me, but to my family and communities that I care deeply about: LGBTQ, immigrants, people of color and other marginalized groups.”
Wellllllllll, the Wayback Machine, an internet archive source, disagrees.
Tuesday, the Wayback Machine shredded Reid’s statement. It’s beautiful:
Some recent press stories (1, 2) have discussed archived blog posts of a prominent journalist, Joy Ann Reid, in the Wayback Machine and her claims that some of these posts were “manipulated” by an “unknown, external party”.This past December, Reid’s lawyers contacted us, asking to have archives of the blog (blog.reidreport.com) taken down, stating that “fraudulent” posts were “inserted into legitimate content” in our archives of the blog. Her attorneys stated that they didn’t know if the alleged insertion happened on the original site or with our archives (Reid’s claim regarding the point of manipulation is still unclear to us).When we reviewed the archives, we found nothing to indicate tampering or hacking of the Wayback Machine versions. At least some of the examples of allegedly fraudulent posts provided to us had been archived at different dates and by different entities.We let Reid’s lawyers know that the information provided was not sufficient for us to verify claims of manipulation. Consequently, and due to Reid’s being a journalist (a very high-profile one, at that) and the journalistic nature of the blog archives, we declined to take down the archives. We were clear that we would welcome and consider any further information that they could provide us to support their claims.
Though, according to the Wayback Machine, it looks like someone tried to divert traffic away from Reid’s archived posts:
At some point after our correspondence, a robots.txt exclusion request specific to the Wayback Machine was placed on the live blog. That request was automatically recognized and processed by the Wayback Machine and the blog archives were excluded, unbeknownst to us (the process is fully automated). The robots.txt exclusion from the web archive remains automatically in effect due to the presence of request on the live blog.
The internet rumor mill says NBC will be issuing a statement sometime soon. When that happens, we’ll let you know. Until then, I leave you this as a parting gift:
And a bonus gift:
CLICK HERE FOR FULL VERSION OF THIS STORY