I'm writing this perhaps a bit sideways as a story about whether to cover this rather than getting into the specific content of what Joy Reid allegedly wrote. I've debated myself as to whether this should be blogged, but it appears to be picking up some steam as a story, albeit one that needs more investigation to substantiate Joy Reid's claims of hacking and that she is innocent of the allegations of homophobia being leveled against her.
Without getting into the explosive content of the allegedly newly uncovered alleged writings of Reid, let me address the previous controversies, the new controversy and Reid's explanation. Last summer Reid got into a very public Twitter spat with Chelsea Manning using some language that many would rightfully consider transphobic, asking whether her release of evidence of what amounts to war crimes in Iraq by the U.S. on Manning’s gender dysphoria: “...isn't it arguable that if she'd had access to reassignment she'd have been less volatile & vulnerable?” After the tweetstorm by Reid, her comments were brought up in a Salon article about the liberal betrayal of Manning:
Joy Reid, a Democratic pundit who often appears on MSNBC, likewise dwells on Manning's alleged emotional problems and gayness. Because he allegedly divulged to a hacker-turned-informant that he was struggling with his gender identity, Reid – ignoring all the inconvenient comments about being outraged by torture and civilian deaths – argued that Manning was no hero at all, but rather “a guy seeking anarchy as a salve for his own personal, psychological torment” caused by his sexuality. In this case one might well ask: What if Rick Santorum said it?
Then last December, a user on Twitter dug up an old blog post on her now defunct blog bylined to Joy Reid in which she made homophobic references about Florida's Charlie Crist. When those writings came to light, she admitted to the authorship and immediately apologized for their content, saying in a statement released by NBC,
This note is my apology to all who are disappointed by the content of blogs I wrote a decade ago, for which my choice of words and tone have legitimately been criticized.
Among the frequent subjects of my posts was then-governor Charlie Crist, at the time a conservative Republican, whose positions on issues like gay marriage and adoption by same-sex couples in Florida shared headlines with widely rumored reports that he was hiding his sexual orientation.
Let me be clear: 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. Nonetheless, as someone who is not a member of the LGBT community, I regret the way I addressed the complex issue of the closet and speculation on a person’s sexual orientation with a mocking tone and sarcasm. It was insensitive, tone deaf and dumb.
In addition to friends and coworkers and viewers, I deeply apologize to Congressman Crist, who was the target of my thoughtlessness. My critique of anti-LGBT positions he once held but has since abandoned was legitimate in my view. My means of critiquing were not.
That appeared to be the end of it until a few days ago when the same twitter user pointed to other blog posts on her defunct blog that are even more homophobic than her admitted comments about Crist. The blogposts were found on the Internet Archive, aka the Wayback Machine. Reid however, is denying authorship of at least some of the posts, though not specifying which she did write. She is instead claims one of two things must have happened: 1) The Internet Archive was hacked adding those posts to the archive of her blog maintained by the Wayback machine or 2) someone hacked her blog and added the posts which were then archived by the Wayback Machine.
In December, her lawyers attempted to get the posts removed from the Wayback Machine, but they did not find any evidence that they were hacked and declined to removed the content; however, Reid’s technical team added a special file (called a robots.txt file) to Reid’s no longer existent site that automatically directs the Wayback Machine to not only not archive the site further, but to delete its existing archive. That process is automatic and was not actively done by staff of the Wayback Machine. On their blog, the Wayback Machine today addressed the issue:
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 (the point at which the manipulation is to have occurred, according to Reid, 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.
(emphasis added)
This leaves Reid’s second claim, that someone must have hacked her site to add the posts that were then subsequently archived by the Wayback Machine. This too poses a problem for Reid. This explanation for the content of the posts relies upon someone, a decade ago, hacking into her blog and adding the homophobic posts, which escaped the notice of Reid and anyone else who worked or read the blog, only to be pointed out a decade later after Reid has ascended in prominence as a leading commentator on race, gender and the media in the age of Trump as the host of her own MSNBC show and working as a national correspondent for NBC.
In order for this explanation of Reid to be plausible, the content she is alleging is not hers had to be injected into her blog more than a decade ago. As the Wayback Machine’s statement glosses over, the site works by taking a snapshot in time and timestamped to that specific point in time. The alleged offending posts were timestamped as having been part of the blog 10 years ago and multiple times since then. To reiterate, The Wayback Machine found no tampering with their versioning of her site. If her site had been hacked relatively recently, the alleged offending posts would not be timestamped as having been on the site 10 years ago.
While I wouldn’t have a problem believe that this could be some Russian front work to 1) sow discord in the liberal media and among liberal activists and 2) take down a prominent critic of Donald Trump, this supposes that they were setting up a long game to take her down as far back ad before the 2008 Presidential campaign before Donald Trump was even starting a legitimate run for President.
At this point I’m not totally sure what to believe. In as much as I’d like to believe Reid and that she would not have made such comments or that if she had, she’d own up to them and apologize, stressing that she no longer believes them and that she has changed her beliefs about LGBT people in the last decade. Lots of people have, but given the recent spat with Manning and her admitted comments about Crist, and even the hedging of not all the newly uncovered posts haven’t been the result of the hacker, I’m disinclined to believe her this time. This puts liberals in an uncomfortable quandary regarding Reid. She also needs to come clean to address the matter head on, because it is only going to fester if she doesn’t and puts into question her credibility as a leading liberal journalist.
If you wish to get into the nitty gritty, the details of the allegedly homophobic posts, I’m not going to post the content here, but instead will point to a few articles were their content is given:
EXCLUSIVE: Joy Reid Claims Newly Discovered Homophobic Posts From Her Blog Were ‘Fabricated’ (Mediaite)
MSNBC’s Joy Reid Claims Her Website Was Hacked and Bigoted Anti-LGBT Content Added, a Bizarre Story Liberal Outlets Ignore (The Intercept by Glenn Greewald)
Joy Reid Blames Hackers for Anti-Gay Blog Posts, but Questions Mount (New York Times)
MSNBC's Joy Reid says anti-gay posts on her old blog were 'fabricated', Internet Archive responds (BoingBoing by Xeni Jardin)
Wednesday, Apr 25, 2018 · 11:09:35 AM +00:00
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craigkg
Updated information from a CNN article gives some new information that’s not good for Reid. While we don’t have an accounting from Reid as to which of the old posts are hers and which they allege are the product of a hacking, CNN’s article provides an example of posts Reid’s attorney alleges weren’t hers because there were three long posts written in a row. From the CNN article
Reid's attorney, John H. Reichman, highlighted what he said was another discrepancy in his letters to the companies, pointing out that Reid published posts on January 10, 2006 about the confirmation hearings for Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito at 10:18 a.m., 11:34 a.m. and 11:41 a.m., but that the archive showed what Reichman described as a "lengthy, fraudulent entry" at 11:28 a.m.
"Ms. Reid did not have the superhuman blogging skills needed to do all of these posts simultaneously," Reichman wrote.
A Library of Congress archive of the site shows that the "lengthy" entry contains only two sentences of text actually written by the post's author; the rest is a quote.
The Library of Congress archive reviewed by CNNMoney -- which the Library says is created using a local installation of the Wayback Machine -- contains the disputed posts and lists them as having been archived on January 12, 2006.
(emphasis added)
This could be the lawyer not understanding that almost every blogging platform in the world has the ability to schedule a post to be publicly posted and timestamped at a future date/time, but this otherwise seems to support the contention that the posts are authentic as they were contemporaneously being indexed by the Wayback Machine or at least the LOC’s local install of the Wayback Machine where the blog records appear to still exist. The contention that she couldn’t have written other posts because she was on the air at the time they posted and similarly be explained by scheduling to post at a future date/time.