The federal government has been shut down for 35 hours, 5 minutes, and 58 seconds. But Joy Reid is hard at work. As the shutdown time ticks away on an onscreen countdown clock, she checks her phone and lets loose a long, sibilant “Yessss!” Quickly followed by an exultant “We’re trending!”
A weekend-morning MSNBC show, lodged firmly in the posthangover, prebrunch hours, wouldn’t ordinarily be the stuff of trending topics. But the rules have changed since November 8, 2016. Now Reid’s show, AM Joy, regularly pulls in viewers, and 2017 marks the first time in 16 years that MSNBC beat out CNN in the Saturday-morning time slot. Twitter swells with real-time reactions from #Reiders, especially when Reid schools a guest in her trademark patient, no-nonsense fashion. (After Shonda Rhimes retweeted a clip of Reid calmly demolishing a guest who was spouting Clinton Foundation conspiracy theories—appending the comment “Just in case you’re wondering how to dismiss foolishness”—Reid confesses, “I died. Oh, I died!”) Given the cacophony of cable news, where the loudest panelist often wins, Reid’s approach has few antecedents on the right or the left, but perhaps that’s why she has so many newly minted fans: In a sensationalist climate, she refuses to let facts wriggle out of her grasp.
“Joy’s fearless authenticity is perfect for this moment, when people feel like, ‘Am I crazy? Are things absolutely bonkers right now, or am I losing my mind?’’’ says her fellow MSNBC host Chris Hayes. “To find someone who is as commanding as Joy is, who’s like, ‘No, things are pretty nuts, and here’s why,’ that really resonates.”
Reid never thought she’d be the one in the host’s chair, but her childhood couldn’t have scripted that path more clearly. Growing up in Montbello, Colorado, she was a word vulture, calling dibs on the crossword and front page of the newspaper and plowing her way through a set of bound classic books her mother had bought from a door-to-door salesman. As a latchkey kid with a single mom, she says, “TV was, in some sense, my babysitter.” One night, she begged her mother to allow her to stay up late for a news program. “It was a countdown to the [1979 Iran] hostage crisis and would eventually be renamed Nightline,” Reid recalls. She watched it nightly until she graduated from high school, along with a steady diet of TV news shows. “My goal was to be a guest. I just wanted to be a guest on Chris Matthews’s show, on Meet the Press, and on The McLaughlin Group. I was like, Those will be my three shows. I’ll be sitting there with Freddy ‘the Beadle’ Barnes.”
But first: Harvard, where she studied film, wanting to be “the girl Spike Lee.” For years afterward, she bounced around between the worlds of marketing, radio, print journalism, TV, and politics. She calls herself “the winding cork on the ocean road to TV.”
By 2014, she landed her own MSNBC show, The Reid Report, in the afternoons, and a year later, she began hosting AM Joy, making good on that winding road. She also often pinch-hits for Matthews, Hayes, and Rachel Maddow. “Joy’s platform elevates the discourse in the echo chamber that is cable news these days,” says Tiffany D. Cross—cofounder of the political diversity platform The Beat DC and Reid’s frequent guest—via email. “Her background in documentaries gives her keen insight into bridging imagery with information. Her experience in print journalism honed her skills for content discovery. Her time working in the Black press gives her the ability to quickly identify unique angles. And the breadth of her experience as a woman—a wife, a mother, a sister, a friend, a boss—commands interest,” Cross writes. People who would otherwise just read the headline and move on, she adds, “tune in for a full two hours to get real analysis from Joy.”
When I arrive on a Sunday morning to observe Reid at work, the streets around 30 Rock are still shut down from the previous day’s Women’s March, and everything feels morning-after somber. I wait in a ground floor holding room, where HD-screen walls flash with images of NBC anchors past—mostly square-jawed white men. An elevator whooshes me up to the studio, which seems, to someone whose main frame of reference is Joan Cusack in Broadcast News sprinting through a newsroom clutching a VHS tape, strangely sedate. Absent the cameras and the lights clustered in the ceiling, and the stylist jumping in to adjust her makeup during breaks, the 49-year-old Reid might be chatting at her kitchen table at home in Brooklyn. She’s at the point where her on- and offscreen conversations have begun to merge: During one break, she mentions to a guest whom she’s met before, “I can never remember the context in which I meet people, whether it’s on or off TV.”
But behind this serene scene, Reid is working away. Post-taping, she’ll tell me that due to breaking news, including the shutdown, she and her team planned the show at 6 P.M. the night before, then had to keep changing it well into the morning hours, because President Trump, as she puts it wearily, “keeps doing things.” In between segments, she wields her phone like a missile launcher, tweeting away or texting her family and friends. (Reid is married with three kids, and her work and home lives inevitably blend.) A staffer sees her texting during a commercial break and says, with exasperation, “Joy, you can do that after the show.”
On air, Reid’s role is more nuanced than that of an Edward R. Murrow type. She doesn’t intone the day’s headlines, and she sometimes gets personal. When President Trump reportedly referred to Caribbean and African nations as “shitholes,” Reid, whose parents emigrated from Guyana and the Democratic Republic of the Congo, had an emotional on-air response. The value of diversity in media, she believes, is that she’s not describing these events from a distance. She makes it a point to have female guests and guests of color on the show; on days when everyone on the panel is black, she says, laughing, “that’s what we call chocolate Sundays.”
“As a woman of color,” Cross notes, “there’s often this unspoken pressure to dot your i’s with hearts to avert the presumed angry Black woman stereotype. But Joy skirts past that and gets right to the business of unapologetic truth telling.”
Reid also looks for what she calls “ideological diversity,” although that can backfire in cases like the dustup that earned her Rhimes’s attention. “I’m not trying to do Barnum & Bailey’s circus. If you’re coming on to do a circus act and say that Hillary Clinton murdered 40 people, we can’t have a conversation,” she says. When she appears on Meet the Press, she’s been known to run upstairs, in heels, to her own studio between breaks to check a fact. “You have to act fast, because once something’s said on TV, people think it’s true. So that’s one of the reasons I will interrupt people.” Notes Hayes, “She has this deep centeredness I have come to really value and appreciate. She doesn’t really raise her voice. She’s not a ranter; she’s not a yeller.”
Still, every viral clip earns cries of approval from the rah-rah arm of the left-wing media—and ire from the far right. Reid tells me the harassment has spread beyond Twitter; she recently had to inform NBC of a rape threat.
Her philosophy, she tells me, is just to keep on keeping on. “We’re trying to fill the show with as many fact-vitamins as we can, to inoculate our audience against the fact-free nonsense they’ll deal with the rest of the week. We’re trying to load you up with nutritious facts, so when you go into the world and are arguing with your argle-bargle uncle who’s trying to tell you Seth Rich was murdered [referring to the conspiracy theory that the Clintons were somehow involved], you’ve got some facts; or they tell you that Uranium One was a scandal, you’ve got something. We’re delivering people some ammunition to be able to fight in a fact-free world.”
Hair by Paul Warren for Oribe; makeup by Danielle Terry
This article originally appears in the May 2018 issue of ELLE.
