MSNBC’s Joy Reid Loses Over 20% of Viewers After Blog Controversy

It appears that while MSNBC host Joy Reid managed to keep her job, she failed to keep all of her viewers.

Reid, host of AM Joy on the weekends has taken a hit in its viewership following the avalanche of homophobic blog posts that had resurfaced first discovered by Mediaite.

As Contemptor reports, her program averaged 1.113 million total viewers and 238,000 in the key demo between February and April for both her Saturday and Sunday shows. But once the controversy of her now-defunct blog was revived on April 23, her program’s ratings suffered, dropping to an average 876,000 total viewers and 172,000 in the key demo from her April 28 broadcast til today, which is a 21% drop.

Per Contemptor:

Breaking it down by day and hour, we see that Saturday has been where Reid has really seen major erosion of her audience, something we first noticed when we did a snapshot of AM Joy’s ratings a couple of weeks after the controversy first hit. Since late April, Reid’s show has dropped 31 percent in the demo (174,000) and 24 percent in total viewership (928,000) during Saturday’s 10 AM hour compared to the pre-controversy period. At 11 AM on Saturday, the drops are 30 percent in the demographic (178,000) and 25 percent in total audience (926,000).

Reid was widely criticized for her handling of the controversy, initially claiming that hackers had somehow retroactively tampered with her old blog posts. She later issued a quasi-apology that never took full ownership of authoring those blog posts nor for apparently misleading the public about her allegedly-hacked blog. MSNBC stood firmly behind her.

Meanwhile, the opposite occurred to Fox News host Laura Ingraham, who saw a ratings surge since Parkland student David Hogg led an ad boycott against her following a tweet that mocked him.

[image via screengrab]