That fiend who broke into Joy Reid’s blog and tarnished her good name is a busybody.
As discussed in this space previously, Reid, a liberal weekend host at MSNBC, apologized in December after a Twitter user dug up some musty posts from a long-shuttered blog containing homophobic riffs. When more such posts surfaced months later, Reid alleged that an “unknown, external party accessed and manipulated material from my now-defunct blog, The Reid Report, to include offensive and hateful references that are fabricated and run counter to my personal beliefs and ideology.” To prove the claim, she hired a cybersecurity expert and retained a lawyer to seek records from the company that operated her blogging platform.
After a round of forensics, however, Reid conceded on her program: “I’ve spent a lot of time trying to make sense of these posts. I hired cybersecurity experts to see if somebody had manipulated my words or my former blog and the reality is they have not been able to prove it,” she said. “I genuinely do not believe I wrote those hateful things because they are completely alien to me. But I can definitely understand based on things I have tweeted and have written in the past why some people don’t believe me.”
Filthy skeptics. So the Erik Wemple Blog urged the greater media community: We must rally around Joy Reid. The mischief-maker, who performs time-bending operations on the dark Web, must be tracked down and brought before a court of law.
Only now is the world discovering just how prophetic was this call to arms in the Erik Wemple Blog. Because we’ve learned in recent days that there are other strange thoughts residing in the archives of Reid’s blog. Joseph Bernstein and Charlie Warzel of BuzzFeed chronicle the find:
A March 22, 2006, post to her weblog, Reidblog, archived by the Wayback Machine and titled “The official story,” links to Loose Change 9/11, a viral 80-minute web video originally released in 2005. Loose Change, which was produced in part by Infowars’ Alex Jones, alleged that the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center were in fact planned by the US government. The central claims in Loose Change have been widely debunked.
Also excavated by BuzzFeed: An October 2007 post, titled ““Baghdad John Strikes Again,” depicts Sen. John McCain’s head on the body of Virginia Tech shooter Seung Hui Cho.
What brilliant hacking! Who ever would have thought to insert such a bunch of offensive hokum into the dormant archives of a cable news host’s forgotten blog? Other than, of course, a malicious Web sophisticate with the time, money, motivation and power to decide, out of the blue, to undermine Reid’s career.
We’ve seen what apathy and inaction have wrought. Despite the Erik Wemple Blog’s bold demand of one month ago, people have gotten distracted by federal investigations, comedians’ slurs and the like. In the interstices of this national distraction, Reid’s hacker — or, more likely, platoon of hackers — has struck again.
Meanwhile, BuzzFeed’s Bernstein has drawn an irresponsible and ruinous conclusion from MSNBC’s no-comment posture:
Apparently, Bernstein has little appreciation for the toil and institutional commitment required to expose the perpetrator of homophobia-gun-violence-retroactive-archival-temporal-intrusion hacking. The Erik Wemple Blog, too, contacted MSNBC, not to mention the cybersecurity analyst and lawyer whom Reid had recruited earlier this year. We haven’t heard back from any of them — a reassuring sign that their eyes remain on the ball.