Howard University has announced Joy Reid as a visiting journalism professor starting in 2021. She will be joining the Department of Media, Journalism, and Film in the Cathy Hughes School of Communications this coming Spring.
What We Know:
- Last week, Howard University announced that MSNBC host Joy Reid would be teaching a class as a Hearst Visiting Professor next year despite her controversial past. She will be teaching a “master class” of junior and senior journalism students titled “Covering Race, Gender & Politics in the Digital Age.” According to the university, it will introduce students to concepts of political media coverage, focused on issues of race and gender, and discuss how those topics land in today’s increasingly ideologically siloed digitally-influenced newsroom. The topics include digital disinformation and Black voters and racial roots of journalistic objectivity vs. fairness.
“Joy Reid is a great addition to our faculty as Hearst Visiting Professor in Spring 2021, Hearst Visiting Professor in Spring 2021,” Cathy Hughes School of Communications Dean Grace Lawson-Borders said in a statement.
- While MSNBC has handed Reid a promotion in the form of Chris Matthews’ old timeslot, her critics have not been as forgiving over her infamous hacking controversy. In December 2017, Mediaite discovered a trove of homophobic articles written by Reid between 2007 and 2009 on a political blog called The Reid Report. At the time, Reid issued an apology, calling her remarks “insensitive, tone-deaf, and dumb” and vowed to “do better” going forward.
- According to Fox News, Mediaite found even more homophobic articles in April 2018, Reid claimed that an “unknown, external party accessed and manipulated material” on her old blog and “fabricated” the offensive entries and that she was working with a “cyber-security expert” and “notified federal law enforcement officials.”
- Reid addressed the controversy the following week on her show. Although she did offer an apology, she did not take ownership of her blog posts as she did in her first apology, and Reid says those hateful comments are completely alien to her, and she did not write them. “I genuinely do not believe I wrote those hateful things because they are completely alien to me.”
- According to a report from Nielson Media Research, Joy Reid is the host of the MSNBC show The ReidOut. It debuted in July at number one. The first episode featured Chicago mayor Lori Lightfoot, Atlanta mayor Keisha Lance Bottoms, former Attorney General Loretta Lynch, then-presidential candidate Joe Biden, and former presidential candidate Hillary Clinton. Reid earned the second-highest rating ever for any regularly scheduled 7 p.m. program on MSNBC.
Upper-level students studying journalism may join her course for Spring 2021. No word has been released as to whether or not this course will be online or in person.
