Joy Reid & Piers Morgan Clash in Fiery Interview Over MSNBC Firing

Joy Reid and Piers Morgan got into a heated war of words on Thursday’s (July 17) edition of Piers Morgan Uncensored, with the pair arguing over the reasons Reid was fired from MSNBC.

MSNBC canceled The ReidOut back in February as part of several shake-ups at the network. The reason behind the cancelation became the key topic on Morgan’s show, with the British journalist disputing Reid’s claims that she was dropped from MSNBC for being a Black woman.

“Joy, I mean, let’s be honest. I don’t think you were fired after all those years because of your skin color or because you’re a Black woman. I think you were fired because your show just got increasingly unpopular,” Morgan said, per the New York Post.

The ReidOut saw a 28% decline in ratings in February 2025 compared to the same month in 2024, averaging 973,000 total viewers, down from 1.3 million the year prior. Despite this, Reid argued her show’s ratings suffered smaller declines than other MSNBC programs.

Things escalated when Morgan accused Reid of playing “the race card,” to which she replied, “I love the fact that your ‘play the race card’ is your version of the race card. You literally are so fixated on trying to racialize conversations with me, Piers, I actually find it quite charming.”

“You racialize more conversations in your tenure at MSNBC than any host in history,” Morgan shot back before playing clips of some of the more controversial moments from Reid’s tenure at MSNBC, including the time she told podcaster Marc Lamont Hill that being a “Black woman” made White viewers “angrier” when they objected to her views.

Reid fired back at Morgan, saying, “You take an entire conversation I had with Marc Lamont Hill and pick the bits that you can racialize because this is your schtick.”

“You racialize everything Joy, come on… It’s not my schtick, it was your schtick, but people got bored with it,” Morgan retorted.

During the tense interview, Morgan also brought up Reid’s old blog post that resurfaced in 2018 and included homophobic comments.

Before the episode aired on Thursday, Reid spoke on her podcast, The Joy Reid Show, on Wednesday (July 16), saying that Morgan had “ambushed” her and was “obsessed” with race-baiting to appease his “very White audience.”

“The interview, which drops [Thursday], was a cheap, sleazy, very Piers Morgan pivot to take the heat off of the right and Trump and put it right where the right needs to be, on the Black lady,” Reid stated, per Fox News Digital.

Reid claimed she was “lured” onto the show under the premise of discussing her new YouTube show and current political news. She didn’t expect to be confronted with “pre-edited” clips nor her controversial blog posts from over 15 years ago.

Related

Ex-MSNBC Host Joy Reid Issues Dire Warning About 2026 Election

“This was pre-planned because they had edited pieces ready for it,” she said. “He never misses an opportunity to play gotcha with Black guests on his podcast, whom he, like other right-wing podcasters, use as fodder to keep their very White audiences angry and paranoid and clicking.”

“Dredging up an eight-year-old story about a 16-year-old blog post is a hell of a way to justify insanely offensive Nazi quoting things that your boy Donald Trump said and fascist actions his regime took like yesterday,” she continued. “Is that what your show has come to, Piers? Dredging up old news in an effort to make yourself relevant?”

Morgan later responded to Reid’s podcast on X, writing, “BREAKING: I interviewed Joy Reid last night. It did not go well… for Joy Reid. In fact, it went so badly for her that she’s already gone public about how terrible it was, and I am. Apparently, I’m obsessed with race & identity politics (crying laughing emoji).”