The left-leaning Daily Beast website has suspended liberal commentator Joy Reid’s semi-regular column for the website in light of homophobic comments that have resurfaced on a blog she used to write.
“We’re going to hit pause on Reid’s columns,” Daily Beast Executive Editor Noah Shachtman said in an email to staff, according to a report Thursday by the news site the Wrap. “As you’re well aware, support for LGBTQ rights and respect for human dignity are core to Daily Beast. So we’re taking seriously the new allegations that one of our columnists, Joy Reid, previously wrote homophobic blog posts during her stint as a radio host.”
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“Obviously, this is a difficult situation,” it said. “We’ve all said and done things in our lives that we wish we hadn’t done. We deserve the room to grow beyond our past. But these allegations are serious enough that they deserve a full examination.”
At issue are comments Reid apparently made on a personal blog she used to run. The comments resurfaced last week and were noted on Twitter. They included a remark about former Supreme Court nominee Harriet Miers having “lesbian hair” and Reid saying she didn’t like to see two men kissing.
Reid denied that the comments were hers, despite apparently showing up on her website via images available on the Internet Archive.
“I began working with a cybersecurity expert who first identified the unauthorized activity, and we notified federal law enforcement officials of the breach,” she told the website Mediaite.com on Monday. “The manipulated material seems to be part of an effort to taint my character with false information by distorting a blog that ended a decade ago.”
It was unclear from the statement whether Reid was suggesting that the allegedly manipulated content happened by a hacking of the Internet Archive website or her personal blog, which is no longer online in its original form.
In a blog post published Tuesday, however, Chris Butler, office manager for the Archive, often referred to as the “Wayback Machine,” wrote, “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 At least some of the examples of allegedly fraudulent posts provided to us had been archived at different dates and by different entities.”
MSNBC has continued to stand by Reid throughout the controversy.
