A leading LBGTQ group rescinded a media-advocacy award it had given to MSNBC personality Joy Reid Tuesday, amid controversy over a series of anti-gay posts apparently published on Reid’s now-defunct blog, The Reid Report.
PFLAG, a prominent national LGBTQ advocacy organization, revoked the “Straight for Equality in Media award,” which Reid was set to receive in May, after Mediate exposed a number of anti-gay posts on Reid’s decade-old blog.
Reid, who apologized in December for blog posts she wrote suggesting then-Florida governor Charlie Crist was a closeted homosexual, claims the newly discovered posts are “fraudulent entries,” written by a hacker who breached the Wayback Machine, an Internet-archiving service used to recover the old posts.
“When we extended our invitation to Ms. Reid to honor her at our 45th anniversary celebration, we did so knowing about the blog posts from the late 2000s regarding Charlie Crist,” PFLAG National president Jean Hodges said in a statement.
“We appreciated how she stepped up, took ownership, apologized for them, and did better—this is the behavior and approach we ask of any ally. However, in light of new information, and the ongoing investigation of that information, we must at this time rescind our award to Ms. Reid,” she added.
The Wayback Machine, a project of the Internet Archive project, released a statement Tuesday conceding that they did receive a letter from Reid’s attorneys in December describing the breach and asking that the posts be taken down. But the web service maintains that there is no evidence the posts were the product of hacking and has declined to remove the content given Reid’s position as a high-profile journalist.
“When we reviewed the archives, we found nothing to indicate tampering or hacking of the Wayback Machine versions,” the statement said. “We let Reid’s lawyers know that the information provided was not sufficient for us to verify claims of manipulation.”