MSNBC Host Joy Reid has lost more than 20% of her audience in the weeks following her “blog hacking” scandal.
According to Mediaite, Reid’s show “AM Joy” has been in a ratings free-fall since mid-April, when investigative journalists discovered a cache of homophobic posts, buried on Reid’s former blog, “The Reid Report.” At first Reid appeared to acknowledge the posts, and even apologized for them, but quickly changed her story, and claimed an outside party — perhaps Russian hackers — had hacked into her old blog and placed the posts in a complicated effort to discredit her.
An internet sleuth later found evidence that Reid’s posts were indeed made several years ago, and calculated that any hacking effort would have to include a party of time travelers to make Reid’s story credible.
Since the scandal broke, Reid’s audience has fallen from an average of 1.113 million total viewers per week, to 876,000 total viewers, a decline of about 20%. Her pull in her target demographic has fallen by more than a third, from around 238,000 viewers per week to just 175,000 viewers per week.
While the drop may not be entirely the result of Reid’s controversy, Contemptor, which measures and records television audiences, says the correlation is hard to miss. Reid’s audience began to drop off in the weeks following her “apology,” and the drop gained speed once Reid began concocting her conspiracy theories.