A Debate Moderator? No. Joy Reid is a Partisan Hack

There’s a petition circling on the website change.org currently that asks the Commission on Presidential Debates to include commentator Joy Reid as a co-moderator for the third Presidential Debate scheduled for October 19.

“We need Joy Reid from MSNBC to be moderator or co-moderator,” the petition reads. “She is an excellent news journalist and knows her facts. She will hold candidates accountable to tell the truth!”

This is a terrible, terrible idea.

Reid is a partisan hack.

Reid won’t fact check — she won’t even pretend to have the veil of objectivity of other moderators. Instead, she’ll use her platform to promote the Hillary Clinton candidacy, just as she has done with every platform she’s had since she started working for MSNBC.

Reid came up as a blogger on her own site, The Reid Report, and a columnist for The Miami Herald and some other papers. She’s hosted her own show on MSNBC since 2014, and has been on the network for years.

Reid’s tenure at the network has been defined by her sycophantic repetition of Democratic talking points and an abject refusal to take a position against the party.

Edward Snowden’s leaking of sensitive information detailing the US domestic spying program got Reid angry in 2013. Not because of the leak itself, but because the leak came during the Obama tenure.

Reid implied journalist Glenn Greenwald was a traitorous double agent on The Last Word With Lawrence O’Donnell, implied that Greenwald and Snowden conspired against the US government well in advance of their first meeting, and joined with fellow MSNBC personality Melissa Harris-Perry in a diatribe against a Wikileaks spokeswoman for daring to suggest Obama’s behavior regarding surveillance was Nixonian.

Once those disputes cooled down, it was election time for Reid. The expected coronation of Hillary Clinton hit a small, sheepdog shaped snag in the Bernie Sanders campaign, and Reid went after Sanders with both barrels.

Even in June, once the battle was over and Sanders meekly did as he was told and endorsed Clinton, Reid wanted blood. She wrote a fawning profile on rejected Hapsburg replicant Al Giordano, who desperately wants to challenge Sanders in Vermont for his Senate seat in 2018, for The Daily Beast in August.

As Reid herself put it in the article:

Bernie is losing ugly and hurting Democrats’ chances of prevailing against Donald Trump in November.

Any challenge to Hillary Clinton, no matter how minor, had to be responded to with the nuclear option.

Contrast this with the obsequious and unprovoked tweet Reid posted about the Democratic ticket from late July:

In this context, it’s quite clear that Reid is not the ideal choice for debate moderation. Her sycophantic need to assume the necessary partisan position for whatever news item might challenge her party’s establishment automatically disqualifies her from the petition’s title of “excellent new journalist.” It follows that she cannot be trusted to fact check both candidates.

The desire to see someone who speaks to your inherent prejudices on the political stage this year is understandable. Presenting that desire as a function of a real, fact checking press, especially when it concerns a hack like Joy Reid, is disingenuous at best.

Update: Joy Reid doesn’t understand that Russia stopped being a communist country over 20 years ago. This is the person they want to “fact check” the debates.

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