MSNBC’s Reid admired as voice of Trump resisters

NEW YORK — In January, Joy-Ann Reid invited Pastor Mark Burns to be a guest on her MSNBC show to discuss disparaging comments that President Donald Trump had made about Haitian and African immigrants.

The pastor, a Trump defender, refused to acknowledge a vulgarity the president had applied to those countries, as confirmed by two senators.

Burns interrupted Reid when she spoke and talked over her when she tried to counter his points.

Reid called for a “time out” and told Burns that he was wasting her time.

“wasting my time,” he replied.

“Oh, well, then, if I’m wasting your time,” she said, “then goodbye.”

The interview abruptly ended — a nononsense performance from Reid, 49, who on weekend mornings hosts the MSNBC show “AM Joy.”

In 2015, Reid wrote “Fracture: Barack Obama, the Clintons and the Racial Divide”. She also teaches a class at Syracuse University exploring race, gender and the media.

The daughter of immigrants, Reid has emerged as a heroine of the resistance to Trump's leadership.

She has a forceful questioning style that has resonated with MSNBC viewers. She is popular on social media with fans who fondly go by “reiders.”

Reid was born in Brooklyn and raised in Denver alongside two siblings mostly by their mother, a college professor and nutritionist from British Guiana. When Joy-Ann was a child, her father left the family for his native Democratic Republic of Congo.

“He was a phone father,” Reid said.

At 17, she was accepted to Harvard University, where she planned to study medicine. But her mother died of breast cancer three weeks before school started. She took a year off and then switched her major to documentary filmmaking.

“I was thinking Hollywood movies,” she said. “Come to find out, Harvard doesn’t do that. So I had to study documentary.”

Reid has always been captivated by politics. In the late 1990s, she moved to Miami to write for a local TV morning show and became a fixture among south Florida lawmakers.

She blogged and was involved in minority outreach for voter education. In 2005, she met James Thomas, a longtime disc jockey and radio veteran known as James T, who hired her to produce a talk-radio show for listeners in the black community in Miami.

“I had to convince her of the power we had in radio in Miami,” Thomas said.

Reid got her break in 2014 when she was hired by MSNBC to create “The Reid Report.” The daily show was short-lived, however, canceled the next year because of poor ratings,

“When it ended, it was not fun,” Reid said. “But it did enable me to ... actually be a field reporter.”

She traveled to 10 states in eight months.

“I think it was good for her,” said Phil Griffin, president of MSNBC. “I tried to explain that to her. I said: ‘You’ve got talent. Don’t worry.’”

She began hosting “AM Joy” in May 2016.