By Abe Greenwald
Wednesday, November 12, 2025
CNN anchor Abby Phillip went on Joy Reid’s podcast
yesterday and explained how hard she works to bring accurate information to her
battles with the supposed fact-free right. “Conservatives are living in a
completely different information world than liberals,” she said. “And breaking
that down needs to be done. Because when you don't ever even hear the facts,
it's hard to even know that you're wrong. And that happens a lot!” Phillip says
she spends half her job “knowing what the latest conspiracy is” so she’s ready
to debunk it. "I think that one time a person brings up something that is
debunked and false, and I debunk it at the table, might be the very first time
someone out there has heard an alternative point of view.”
We’ll get to Phillip’s claim about conservatives, facts,
and information bubbles. But I have to spend a moment on her host, who nodded
along with this characterization of the loony right. Joy Reid, the reigning
queen of debunked bunk, is best known for inhabiting an information world all
her own. I don’t think I knew who she was until 2017, when she made headlines
for blaming hackers for a bunch of anti-gay statements written on her blog—only
to eventually apologize.
That came near the start of her wild ride at MSNBC. Among
Reid’s greatest hits: She said that conservatives would give up tax cuts if
they could “openly say the n-word.” She implied that Elon Musk “misses” South
African apartheid. She dismissed Thanksgiving as a “fairy tale” and claimed
she’s too scared to leave her home on July 4 because “America is awash with
guns” and its citizens “seem to want to shoot people with them.” MSNBC got rid
of her earlier this year.
Abby Phillip is something entirely different, and, in a
way, she’s worse. She’s the respectable face of a mainstream media that has no
clue why Americans no longer find it respectable. She doesn’t understand that
her “information world” was exposed for pushing misinformation on an industrial
scale, literally.
It was the liberal-media consensus that got debunked,
over and over again. There were the yearslong lies about Donald Trump colluding
with Russia, the denouncing of anyone who tried to pierce the Fauci fog around
the origins of Covid-19, the assurances of “mostly peaceful” riots, the claim
that Hunter Biden’s laptop was part of a Russian disinfo op, the long and
dangerous cover-up of Joe Biden’s health, the fluffy Kamala Harris interviews,
the promotion of shoddy gender science, the endless lies about Israeli war
crimes, the laundering of Zohran Mamdani’s anti-Semitic record, and much more.
It’s still going on.
Conspiracy theories are indeed a poison in this country,
and the right-wing media sphere is drowning in them. But Americans wouldn’t be
so ready to believe in garbage if the liberal media hadn’t already crashed the
currency of truth. Once you’ve learned to be suspicious of the official story,
you’re ready to hear alternative narratives—about anything.
Instead of spending half her time brushing up on
right-wing conspiracy theories, Phillip may want to put some more effort into
reestablishing the severed trust that once prevailed between her industry and
the American people.
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