Joy-Ann Reid, an MSNBC political commentator, spoke on Tuesday as part of the University Lectures series. She has recently been profiled as a “Heroine of the Resistance” in The New York Times.

This cheap cheerleading is a sad reminder of how stagnant and manufactured the media talent pool for real liberal and left-wing voices has become. Corporate media is not the resistance. Reid has never been anything more than an abettor to the centrist, neoliberal old guard that seeks to undermine any tangible progressive movement with incrementalist finger-wagging.

This is most evident in her relentless and incoherent attacks on Bernie Sanders and progressives, ranging from standard “Bernie Bro” rhetoric to cheap shots claiming Sanders was dismissive of his own wife (which were immediately shot down by Jane Sanders), reaching a fever pitch with a laughable tweet that claimed Steve Bannon to be “one part Bernie Sanders.” She also stated in 2010 that Sanders was the “great clarion voice” of the Democratic Party.

Looking further down Reid’s political history, we can find homophobic screeds she published from 2007-09 directed at former Florida Gov. Charlie Crist, referring to him as “Miss Charlie” and propagating an Alex Jones-esque conspiracy theory that he was a gay man who refused to come out of the closet. This is the same Joy Reid who constantly characterized Sanders’ supporters as bigots.

Lastly is her tendency to be factually inaccurate. For example, her ridiculous and xenophobic statement that Ivana Trump was “from what used to be Soviet Yugoslavia.” Yugoslavia was never a part of the Soviet Union, nor was Ivana’s country, Slovakia, ever a part of Yugoslavia. She has even managed to ambitiously combine her hatred of progressives with her tendency to be utterly wrong by tweeting that the executive director of the country’s largest nurses union was an “alt left activist.”

Reid is emblematic of two great political cancers. First, that corporate media never has, and never will be, the resistance — much less one owned by Comcast. And secondly, that the wan, uninspiring neoliberalism afflicting the Democratic Party will never substitute for a strong, progressive ethos that actually pushes for reform benefiting the American people.

Joseph Gleason

SUNY-ESF Class of 2018

Published on April 3, 2018 at 6:39 pm