Was Joy Ann Reid’s primetime MSNBC show canceled because she’s Black? Some pundits seem to think so. Former MSNBC primetime host Keith Olbermann condemned Reid’s ouster, along with the concurrent cancellation of Alex Wagner, Katie Phang, Jonathan Capehart, and Ayman Mohyldin’s shows, as “[a]n MSNBC purge so brutally racist it makes you think it was done by Musk.”

MSNBC mainstay Rachal Maddow called the network’s decision to cut their two non-White primetime hosts “unnerving.” While civil rights lawyer Ben Crump also highlighted the role Reid’s race played: “Joy Reid’s exit from ‘The ReidOut’ is yet another Black woman losing her solo anchor spot at MSNBC,” he tweeted. 

The Nation’s Elie Mystal offered a more nuanced argument, writing that Reid was fired not just because she was Black, but also because she cultivated new Black voices on her show. “Joy would go out of her way to find young Black talent and put them on her show; then, she put them in situations where they were treated like white talent.” Mystal further observed that “[c]able news has never been truly comfortable with authentic Black voices,” and pointed out that past shows led by Black hosts Melissa Harris-Perry and Tiffany Cross shared a similar fate. 

For now, no one outside of MSNBC’s senior management can say with certainty why Reid’s show was canceled, but we do know that MSNBC has a history of firing Black hosts and replacing them with… other Black hosts. Recall that Joy Reid herself was brought on to replace Melissa Harris-Perry after she reportedly refused to obsessively cover Trump in the leadup to the 2016 election—although Harris-Perry’s decision now seems prescient given how outsized media attention helped Trump to gain credibility. Tiffany Cross’s show was replaced by Jonathan Capehart—also Black. And now, Joy Reid’s show is being replaced by a three-person panel show that includes two Black hosts: MSNBC’s own Symone Sanders and never-Trump Republican Michael Steele. Clearly Reid’s race was not the sticking point.

What about ratings? MSNBC, like other cable channels, faced a ratings crisis in 2022 after Biden returned to the White House and again in the weeks immediately after the 2024 election (though numbers are rebounding). The ReidOut’s ratings flagged recently—declining 47 percent after election day. But Nielsen ratings from February 2024 show that Reid beat out Morning Joe, the 11th Hour with Stephanie Ruhle, Katy Tur, Ana Cabrera Reports, Chris Jansing Reports, Andrea Mitchell, and her replacement Symone Sanders’ show, the Weekend. So if Reid wasn’t performing worse than her peers, what would have made her a target? There is one area in which Reid was relatively unique among her peers: her willingness to report truthfully on Isreal’s genocide in Palestine. 

Bipartisan censorship of Israel-critical voices is rampant: in Congress on campus and yes, in the press. Last year, the Intercept reported on a leaked New York Times memo in which journalists were told to avoid words like “genocide,” “ethnic cleansing,” and “occupied territory” in their stories. Meanwhile, words like “slaughter,” “massacre,” and “carnage” are used almost exclusively to describe Israeli deaths, not Palestinian ones. 

Last November, more than 100 BBC staffers wrote a letter accusing the British broadcasting giant of pro-Israel bias. Just this past week, journalists from five British media outlets including Sky, the Guardian, and the Times spoke to Delassified UK anonymously, fearing professional retaliation, about the same problem in their newsrooms. As one reporter from the Times explained, “I literally cried in the bathroom so many times because of the uphill battle of trying to get things reported.” 

I was fired from my job co-hosting the Hill’s morning show, Rising, after facing mounting internal pressure to cover Gaza less and to provide more favorable coverage to Israel in the name of ‘balance.’ (No similar calls for balance were ever made in favor of Palestine or in any other subject area we covered, nor were there ever efforts to wrest editorial control over our direct-to-camera “Radar” segments until I turned my focus to Gaza.) 

My case is hardly unique. Two years before I was fired, my colleague Katie Halper was let go by the Hill after she wrote a “Radar” in which she called Israel an “apartheid state." They refused to let it air. The editor-in-chief of this magazine had his Guardian column discontinued after that paper’s editor-in-chief took issue with Nathan Robinson’s satirical tweet highlighting how frequently US spending packages include weapons-aid to Israel. In 2018, CNN host Marc Lamont Hill was fired after he gave a speech at the U.N. calling for a free Palestine “from the river to the sea.” Even conservative pundit Candace Ownens was forced to part ways with Ben Shapiro’s The Daily Wire after she criticized Israel’s military bombardment of Gaza.

Back at MSNBC, recall that immediately after October 7, 2023, MSNBC’s three Muslim hosts—Mehdi Hasan, Ayman Mohyeldin, and Ali Velshi, who had all been pro-Palestinian voices—were suspended. Mohyeldin was scheduled to anchor Reid’s show that week. Unsurprisingly, that didn’t happen, and Mehdi parted ways with the organization within months.

And yet despite compelling evidence that pro-Palestine voices were being punished at the network, on the one year anniversary of October 7, Reid hosted author Ta-Nehisi Coates for a conversation about how few Palestinian journalists were invited to cover Gaza. She has also welcomed Palestinian voices like Rutgers professor Noura Erakat and hosted MSNBC veteran Mehdi Hasan on the show to discuss the critical impact Gaza had on the 2024 election. Last August, in the face of pressure from Democrats to rally around Kamala Harris’s last minute campaign, Reid affirmed the concerns of pro-Palestine voters, saying: “It [is] fair for people to ask: why are we giving bombs to Israel? [...] These questions will surely be visible during the DNC next week. [...] For god’s sake, this needs to end.” As Drop Site’s Ryan Grim tweeted, “They just canceled Joy Reid, a reliable Dem supporter but who was willing to criticize Israel and sometimes the party.…Alex Wagner, also willing to criticize Israel and Dems sometimes, is being replaced by…Jen Psaki. Amazing.”

In a tearful interview last week with Win with Black Women, Reid tacitly endorsed the idea that her editorial choices, including her coverage of Gaza, played a role in her ouster. After listing a variety of subjects she prioritized on The ReidOut, she stressed her unapologetic coverage of Gaza: “Whether it’s talking about any of these issues and yes—whether it’s talking about Gaza,  and the fact that we as the American people have a right to object—to have a right to object to little babies being bombed. And where I come down on that is, I'm not sorry. I am not sorry that I stood up for those things. Because those things are of God.” Why, then, is this angle largely absent from the mainstream commentary about her cancellation—including in Mystal’s 1,400-word piece?

For years, I and others on the anti-establishment left have criticized those who selectively wield identity to advance interests that are often opposed to the priorities of the minority groups they purport to represent. See, for example, the choice to nominate a Black prosecutor to be the  vice presidential candidate in the wake of a mass movement protesting police misconduct against Black people. Or the focus on Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion at corporations that pollute, bomb, or deny healthcare to diverse communities. Bernie Sanders’s more expansive commitment to reproductive freedoms became less relevant than the fact that his 2016 presidential opponent, Hilary Clinton, was a woman. And when Clinton asked if breaking up the banks would cure racism, this was accepted by the corporate press as evidence of her “woke” bona fides. In truth, it was a deflection deployed to evade criticism for prioritizing the interests of the financial sector over working people, many of whom are Black. Identity has been weaponized by Democrats to advance the interests of corporations, corporate political candidates, the military industrial complex, and yes, corporate media. Now, I believe it’s being weaponized to cover up ideological censorship at a major liberal news outlet. 

What’s important here is not race, but ideology. Sometimes, but not always, these things are related. For example, I suspect that Reid was willing to risk covering Palestine because, like many Black Americans, myself included, she sees Palestinian apartheid reflected in her own experience as a minority in a settler colonial country, and the stakes are clear. I applaud her for taking that risk. But I was also told by a person with knowledge that a booker who used to find guests for Reid’s show said that after they suggested me as a guest, Reid no longer wanted to work with them. Mystal titled his piece “The Value of Joy” and lauded Reid for supporting Black talent. As someone who shares her name, I have to protest: Not all Joys were valued by Joy Reid. Certainly not ones who criticize the Democratic Party from the left. Much like Reid’s replacement Symone Sanders did in 2016, I served as National Press Secretary for Bernie Sanders in 2020. But unlike Symone, who went on to work for Joe Biden, I returned to journalism after the end of the campaign, immediately breaking from Sanders to criticize his choice to endorse Joe Biden without securing any concessions for the millions of working-class Americans who supported his campaigns. 

For the crime of being critical of the Democratic Party—encouraging Democrats to embrace the progressive issues popular among their base, like Medicare for All—I was told by party apparatchiks that I “would never work in town again.” Tiffany Cross likened me to Dave Chappelle character Clayton Bigsby—a white supremacist who’s Black—and said the quiet part out loud: “Attn younger ppl hoping to pursue a career in political communications: comms work requires thinking, strategy, foresight. Always uplifting the candidate.” Tiffany is right: Career advancement in the Washington political scene, and on corporate news, requires “always uplifting the candidate.” Unfortunately, that’s the job of a comms flack. Not a journalist.

Academic Melissa Harris-Perry and journalist Joy Ann Reid are now replaced by literal spokespeople for the Biden and Harris administration—Jen Psaki, who stood at the pressroom podium and said that Biden was so fit that “sometimes he’s hard to keep up with,” and Symone Sanders, who infamously declared that there would be no Democratic primary, primary voter preferences be damned. Hosting MSNBC news shows is a privilege they enjoy precisely because they manufactured consent for Democratic leadership instead of reporting honestly. They weren’t honest about Biden when he was plainly physically unfit to run for office, or when 2023 polls showed that two-thirds of Democratic voters did not want him to run, and they’re unlikely to be honest about what would be necessary to pull Democratic Party favorability out of the toilet and make the Democrats a real opposition party again. 

Consider what it means to lose a host like Reid not merely because she is Black, but because she reported accurately on Palestine. Consider what it means for MSNBC to offer former George W. Bush commsperson Nicolle Wallace a primetime show, but to not welcome guests from the progressive Bernie Sanders movement that captured 43 percent of the Democratic electorate in 2016. Consider that in a 2017 New York Magazine interview, Reid ‘joked’ that “I agree more with Jennifer Rubin, David Frum, and Max Boot than I do with some people on the far left.” Consider what it means to give a primetime seat to never-Trump Republican Michael Steele and reject Joy Reid’s accurate and much needed coverage of Palestine. 

Mystal wrote in The Nation that “White executives…tend to treat Black folks as interchangeable,” but “Joy Reid is not interchangeable—she’s indispensable.” This is both right and wrong. Reid is being replaced by a Black woman just like she replaced Harris-Perry. When it comes to race, she can be replaced. That’s why the focus on her identity completely misses her value. Joy Reid’s value was in her values—at least with respect to Palestine. For that, she will be missed.