24 Facts About Joy Reid

Joy Reid's father was from the Democratic Republic of the Congo, and her mother a college professor and nutritionist from Guyana.

Joy Reid's parents met in graduate school at the University of Iowa in Iowa City.

Joy Reid was raised Methodist and has one sister and one brother.

Joy Reid's father was an engineer who was mostly absent from the family; her parents eventually divorced and her father returned to the Congo.

Joy Reid was raised mostly in Denver, Colorado, until the age of 17, when her mother died of breast cancer and she moved to Flatbush, Brooklyn, to live with an aunt.

Joy Reid graduated from Harvard University in 1991 with a concentration in film studies.

Joy Reid had to learn to live with roommates and people who were not her family.

Joy Reid paid her own bills and tuition while at Harvard and said it was a good learning and growing experience overall.

In 1997, Joy Reid married Jason Joy Reid, who later became a documentary film editor.

Joy Reid began her journalism career in 1997, leaving New York and her job at a business consulting firm to begin working in South Florida for a WSVN Channel 7 morning show.

Joy Reid left journalism in 2003 to work with the group America Coming Together to oppose the Iraq War and President George W Bush.

Joy Reid later returned to broadcasting as a talk radio host and worked on Barack Obama's 2008 presidential campaign.

From 2006 to 2007, Joy Reid was the co-host of Wake Up South Florida, a morning radio talk show broadcast from Radio One's then-Miami affiliate WTPS, alongside "James T" Thomas.

Joy Reid served as managing editor of The Grio, a political columnist for Miami Herald, and the editor of The Reid Report political blog.

From February 2014 to February 2015, Joy Reid hosted her own MSNBC afternoon cable news show, The Joy Reid Report.

Joy Reid is the author of the book Fracture: Barack Obama, the Clintons, and the Racial Divide, published by HarperCollins on September 8,2015.

In 2015, Reid gave the inaugural Ida B Wells lecture at Wake Forest University's Anna Julia Cooper Center.

In 2017, Joy Reid ranked fourth among Twitter's top tweeted news outlets and most tweeted journalist at each outlet.

Joy Reid teaches a Syracuse University class in Manhattan exploring race, gender, and the media.

Joy Reid was a 2003 Knight Center for Specialized Journalism fellow.

In 2018, Joy Reid was nominated for three NABJ Salute to Excellence Awards.

The Zionist Organization of America called for MSNBC to fire Joy Reid for promoting "sinister anti-Semitic canards".

Joy Reid held that this amounted to what US media would usually describe as "radicalizing people" in the case of "leaders, let's say in the Muslim world, talk a lot of violent talk and encourage their supporters to be willing to commit violence including on their own bodies in order to win against whoever they decide is the enemy".

Conversely, commentator Jennifer Rubin defended Joy Reid, arguing she had merely highlighted a double standard in the media without endorsing it.