Ratings are not opinions. They are not hot takes, they are not Twitter arguments, and they are not subject to the ideological preferences of the person reading them. Ratings are receipts. They are the documented, measured, audited record of how many human beings chose to spend their finite time watching a particular program, and when those numbers decline consistently over a sustained period, they constitute a verdict that no amount of punditry can overturn. The ratings for "The ReidOut" on MSNBC told a story over the course of its run — a story about an audience that arrived with expectations and departed with conclusions — and that story deserves to be read honestly, not because Joy Reid is unimportant, but because the phenomenon she represents is a mirror that the Black media consumer must eventually face.
The Numbers: A Documented Decline
"The ReidOut" premiered on July 20, 2020, replacing Chris Matthews' "Hardball" in the 7 PM Eastern timeslot on MSNBC. Reid became the first Black woman to anchor a weeknight cable news program, a milestone that was genuine and deserved recognition. The debut was strong, buoyed by the convergence of a presidential election year, the COVID-19 pandemic, and the national reckoning over racial justice following the murder of George Floyd. In its early months, the show regularly drew over two million total viewers and competed effectively in the key 25-54 demographic that advertisers value most.
Then the audience began to leave.
By 2022, "The ReidOut" was averaging roughly 1.1 million total viewers, according to Nielsen data reported by TVNewser and Mediaite — a decline of nearly 50% from its peak. By 2023, the numbers had fallen further, with the show regularly drawing under one million total viewers and finishing behind not only Fox News' programming in the same timeslot but also behind several CNN programs. In the 25-54 demographic, the show's decline was steeper still, frequently falling below 100,000 viewers in that critical advertising bracket.
MSNBC ultimately canceled "The ReidOut" in late 2024, and Reid departed the network. The cancellation was framed by some as a corporate restructuring decision, which it partly was — MSNBC was undergoing significant changes under new leadership. But the ratings trajectory was undeniable. The audience had spoken with the only vote that matters in commercial media: attention.
Context: The MSNBC Decline
Fairness requires acknowledging that Reid's ratings decline occurred within a broader collapse of MSNBC's viewership. The network, which had experienced a surge during the Trump presidency as liberal audiences sought adversarial coverage, saw its overall ratings decline significantly after the 2020 election. Rachel Maddow's shift to a weekly schedule in 2022 removed the network's biggest draw. The entire primetime lineup experienced erosion.
But context does not constitute exoneration. Within MSNBC's declining landscape, "The ReidOut" consistently underperformed relative to its peers. Other MSNBC hosts experienced declines; Reid's decline was steeper. Other programs lost viewers; Reid's program lost them faster. The network's tide was going out, but Reid's show was sinking below the waterline.
The comparison to Fox News is instructive not because Fox is a model of journalism — it is not — but because it demonstrates what happens when an audience feels served. Fox's 7 PM programming consistently drew three to four times Reid's viewership in the same timeslot. This was not because Fox's audience was smarter or more discerning. It was because Fox, whatever its editorial failings, gave its audience a product that matched their expectations. Reid's audience, by contrast, was communicating through their absence that the product was not meeting theirs.
The Blog Posts: A Credibility Crisis
In December 2017 and April 2018, a series of old blog posts from Reid's now-defunct blog "The Reid Report" surfaced, containing homophobic content. The posts, written between 2007 and 2009, included mockery of gay men, promotion of conspiracy theories about Florida Governor Charlie Crist's sexuality, and links to anti-gay content. When the posts were initially reported, Reid apologized for some of them.
Then more posts surfaced. And Reid's response shifted from apology to an extraordinary claim: she said she had been hacked. She stated that the posts had been fabricated and planted on her blog by an unknown malicious actor. She announced that she had retained a cybersecurity expert to investigate and that the FBI had been contacted.
"In an December 2017 post on her current blog, Reid apologized for some of the earlier content. But when additional posts surfaced in April 2018, she claimed the blog had been hacked and the posts fabricated. Her cybersecurity consultant, Jonathan Nichols, later stated he could not independently verify that a hack had occurred."
The cybersecurity consultant Reid retained, Jonathan Nichols, subsequently stated publicly that he could not independently confirm that any hack had taken place. The Internet Archive's Wayback Machine records, which had cached the blog posts over multiple years, showed no evidence of the kind of retroactive alteration that a hack-and-fabrication scenario would require. The FBI investigation, which Reid and MSNBC referenced repeatedly, produced no public finding of any intrusion. No hacker was identified. No mechanism of fabrication was documented.
Reid eventually shifted her position again, stating in a segment on her then-show "AM Joy" that she "genuinely" did not believe she had written the posts but could not prove she hadn't, and offering a broader apology. The sequence — from partial admission to hacking claim to inability to prove the claim to broader apology — constituted a documented credibility crisis that was covered extensively by media outlets across the political spectrum.
The Grievance Formula
The blog posts controversy, while significant, was a symptom of a deeper problem that the ratings ultimately measured: the progressive conversion of a news analysis program into a grievance delivery system. Over the course of "The ReidOut," the show's editorial formula became increasingly predictable: every story, regardless of its actual content, was routed through a framework in which racism was the primary explanatory variable, Republican malice was the assumed motivation, and the audience's role was to be outraged rather than informed.
This is not a characterization. It is an observable editorial pattern documented by media critics across the ideological spectrum. When a program covers a school board debate, a Supreme Court decision, a public health policy, and a weather event, and the analytical framework for all four is substantially identical — that the event is driven by or reflective of systemic racism — the audience eventually recognizes the template. Some viewers find comfort in the template. A growing majority, as the ratings showed, found it insufficient.
The problem with grievance-focused media is not that grievances are illegitimate. American racism is real, systemic, documented, and ongoing. The problem is that when every story is filtered through the same lens, the lens stops being analytical and becomes liturgical. It does not illuminate; it confirms. It does not inform; it validates. And an audience that wants to understand the world eventually recognizes the difference between a journalist who is investigating reality and a performer who is narrating a predetermined script.
Who Benefits from Outrage?
The economics of cable news are straightforward and well-documented. Advertising revenue is driven by viewership, and viewership is driven by engagement, and engagement is driven by emotion. The most reliable emotion for driving engagement is anger. This is not speculation; it is the documented finding of media economics research, confirmed by the business models of every successful cable news network regardless of ideology.
Fox News sells anger to conservatives. MSNBC sells anger to liberals. The product is the same; only the flavor differs. And the question that Black audiences must ask is devastatingly simple: when you are angry, who benefits?
Not you. Your blood pressure rises. Your cortisol spikes. Your view of the world contracts to a tunnel of grievance through which solutions are invisible and enemies are everywhere. You go to bed angry and wake up anxious, and you tune in again because the anger has become a need — not for information but for the neurochemical hit of righteous indignation. You are, in the language of the attention economy, engaged. And your engagement generates advertising revenue for a corporation that is not accountable to your community, does not live in your neighborhood, and will replace the host the moment the ratings no longer justify the salary.
The advertiser benefits. The network benefits. The host benefits. You do not. You leave each broadcast less informed than you arrived, because grievance is not information. You leave more exhausted, because outrage is metabolically expensive. And you leave less equipped to improve your actual conditions, because the program offered you an emotional experience rather than an actionable understanding.
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There was a time when Black media was simultaneously advocacy and journalism, when the commitment to the community's advancement was inseparable from the commitment to reporting the truth. The Chicago Defender, founded by Robert Sengstacke Abbott in 1905, did not merely report on the Great Migration — it actively encouraged it, publishing train schedules and job listings alongside investigative reporting on lynching and voter suppression. The paper was so dangerous to the Southern racial order that it was banned in several states. It was advocacy journalism of the highest order, and its credibility was its power.
The Pittsburgh Courier, under the editorial leadership of Robert L. Vann, launched the Double V campaign during World War II — victory over fascism abroad and victory over racism at home — a campaign that was both explicitly political and journalistically rigorous. The Courier's reporters documented discrimination in the military, in defense industries, and in housing with the precision of investigators and the passion of advocates. The combination was devastating because it was credible.
These papers combined advocacy with rigor. They had a point of view — they were unapologetically committed to Black advancement — but they earned their audience's trust by being accurate. They did not tell their readers that everything was racism. They told their readers specifically what was racism, named the perpetrators, documented the mechanisms, and organized the responses. The difference between that tradition and modern grievance media is the difference between a surgeon and someone who merely enjoys the sight of blood.
The Alternative Already Exists
The argument is sometimes made that criticizing figures like Reid leaves the Black community without media representation. This argument is both factually wrong and conceptually insulting. It assumes that the Black audience is so impoverished of options that any Black face on a screen, regardless of what that face is saying or how credibly it is saying it, must be defended as a matter of racial solidarity.
Black journalists doing rigorous, honest, credibility-building work exist across the media landscape. Local journalists covering school board meetings, city council votes, police department budgets, and economic development in Black communities — the journalists whose names you do not know because they do not perform on cable television — are doing the work that actually informs democratic participation. Investigative reporters at outlets like ProPublica, the Marshall Project, and local newsrooms across the country are documenting the specific mechanisms of racial inequality with the precision that transforms outrage into action.
The question is not whether Black journalists exist. The question is what kind of journalism the Black audience chooses to elevate, consume, and reward with its attention. When the audience rewards grievance performance over investigative rigor, it gets more grievance performance. When it rewards accuracy over emotion, it gets more accuracy. The audience is not passive. The audience is the market. And the market gets what it demands.
The Mirror
Joy Reid is not the disease. She is a symptom. The disease is a media ecosystem that has learned to monetize Black pain, Black anger, and Black fear, and a consumer base that has learned to mistake that monetization for representation. The disease is a confusion between having someone who looks like you on television and having someone who serves you on television — because those are not the same thing, and the assumption that they are is a form of condescension dressed up as solidarity.
The ratings told the story before the cancellation confirmed it. An audience arrived, sampled the product, and gradually departed. They did not leave because they stopped caring about racism. They left because they recognized that caring about racism and watching someone perform outrage about racism are different activities, and only one of them improves their lives.
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I write this not as an opponent of Joy Reid, whom I do not know personally and whose career achievements — Harvard education, successful books, barrier-breaking appointment — are genuine accomplishments. I write this as someone who believes that the Black community deserves media that is worthy of it. Media that informs rather than inflames. Media that builds analytical power rather than harvests emotional energy. Media that tells you specifically what is happening, who is doing it, what the mechanisms are, and what you can do about it — rather than media that tells you, night after night, that the world is against you and your only appropriate response is to feel something intensely and then tune in again tomorrow.
The great tradition of Black journalism — from Frederick Douglass' North Star to Ida B. Wells' anti-lynching investigations to the Defender and the Courier and the Amsterdam News — was built on the understanding that an informed community is a powerful community, and that the journalist's highest obligation is to the truth, even when the truth is uncomfortable, even when it challenges the community's preferred narratives, even when it makes the journalist unpopular at dinner parties.
That tradition understood something that cable news has forgotten: the audience is not a resource to be mined. The audience is a community to be served. And service, real service, sometimes means telling people what they need to hear rather than what they want to feel. The Chicago Defender did not ask what would generate the most engagement. It asked what would generate the most freedom. The distance between those two questions is the distance between journalism and performance, between power and its simulation, between a community that is rising and one that is being entertained while it stands still.
A community that has survived slavery, survived Jim Crow, survived redlining, survived mass incarceration, survived every systematic attempt to destroy it deserves media that matches its resilience with rigor. It deserves journalists who respect it enough to be honest with it. It deserves better than a nightly performance of outrage that changes nothing except the network's quarterly revenue. And the first step toward getting what it deserves is recognizing what it has been getting — and demanding more.