Joy Reid and Sean Hannity are polar opposites politically but Friday afternoon Hannity weighed in on her situation and suggested everyone should forgive her and stop looking to “destroy” TV hosts they disagree with.
It’s good to see Joy (who is no fan of mine) starting to take responsibility for her past remarks. My suggestion is that she follows up with the groups and people who she offended, and learn from all of this. Her apology should be accepted, and she should be given a chance to make it right, and not fired.
Someone needs to take the lead in cable news and stop the “crush, fire them, and destroy hosts you may disagree with” environment. I guess as the number one rated host in cable, I’ll start.
I am grateful for this microphone and the platform given to me everyday by my audience. I am a believer in the freedom of speech for all Americans. I am also a believer in second chances. And as someone who believes in forgiveness, I have to say, we have all fallen short.
Kudos to Hannity, I guess, for trying to take the high road. I very much doubt Joy Reid would do the same for him were the situation reversed. He does have a point about the drive to “crush, fire” and destroy people, though it seems to me it’s often the left that is driving those campaigns. Speaking of which, has progressive champion David Hogg threatened to boycott/destroy anyone else this week or will he save up and do two next week?
From a purely practical standpoint, there’s really no downside to calling an end to going after Reid at this point. If MSNBC were going to do something about her poor ratings and blown credibility they would have done so by now. Instead, they issued a statement today praising her evolution as an individual. Bottom line: She’s immune to consequences so why keep pretending she’s going to eventually be held to some kind of standard?
The Daily Beast reported this afternoon that people inside MSNBC are just as bemused as the rest of us about Reid’s hacking claims though they are less thrilled with what her story has done to MSNBC’s sterling reputation:
The network‘s failure to address that dubious hacking claim has irked many inside 30 Rockefeller Plaza. Several employees who spoke to The Daily Beast—on condition of anonymity so as not to jeopardize their employment—said they were largely unimpressed with the statements, noting that many questions remain conspicuously unanswered.
“Everyone in the building is laughing at the idea that it was a hacker,” one MSNBC staffer told The Daily Beast.
“It’s just a joke,” said another employee…
While Reid is well-liked and respected by colleagues, said one staffer, they are waiting for Reid and MSNBC management to demonstrate a sense of accountability for her inconvenient past writing beyond boilerplate apologies. “It’s very problematic,” said an MSNBC insider.
Personally, I still think Reid should be fired, not for her far-left outlook and not even for her shoddy blog posts, but for her much more recent and obvious lying. One splashy element of her initial hacking claim was that the hacking itself had been referred to the FBI. Whatever happened with that? Did she actually report this to the FBI? Did she later retract that report? I guess I’m not too fond of forgiving someone who has yet to acknowledged the crux of her misbehavior: There was no hacker.
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