Viewers of MSNBC are still holding a grudge against the co-hosts of “Morning Joe” for paying President-elect Donald Trump a visit at his Mar-a-Lago estate in Florida, opting not to tune into the program. The real question is why in the world anyone would want to subject themselves to the kind of weak, watery, and plain pathetic propaganda Joe Scarborough and his co-host wife, Mika Brzezinski, concoct on a daily basis?
Imagine making your coffee with instant powder and toilet water when you could use filtered H20 and freshly ground beans straight from Columbia. That’s what it’s like watching “Morning Joe” when you could get your news from say, Fox, or Newsmax, or TheBlaze.
One has to wonder what possessed the show’s hosts to meet with Trump. Was the purpose of the visit to extend an olive branch in good faith and actually attempt to heal the great divide that has split the country like a three dollar stripper doing a pole dance? Or was it because they’re terrified that they might receive some payback for the way they treated the president-elect over the last few years?
Check out more details from Yahoo News:
The precipitous ratings drop comes at the worst possible time for the morning talk show. On Wednesday, parent company Comcast announced that it was spinning off most of NBCUniversal’s cable channel lineup amid rampant cord-cutting — including cable news networks MSNBC and CNBC. A representative for MSNBC did not immediately respond to a request for comment. According to Nielsen, the four-hour broadcast of Morning Joe drew only 680,000 total viewers on Tuesday, representing a 12 percent dip from Monday’s airing. Additionally, the program only averaged 86,000 viewers in the coveted advertising demographic of adults aged 25-54, also down 12 percent from the previous day.
Compared to the average viewership for 2024, Morning Joe’s total audience on Tuesday was down 38 percent and 37 percent in the key demo. Tuesday also represented the third-lowest-rated Morning Joe broadcast of the year. This further continues the slide that began the moment Scarborough and Brzezinski revealed on Monday that they had recently sat down with Trump to “restart communications.” The moment the husband-and-wife pair opened Monday’s show by dramatically announcing they’d sought to mend fences with the incoming president, after spending years describing him as a threat to democracy and a “fascist,” droves of MSNBC’s devoted anti-Trump viewers flipped the channel.
Usually during an episode of the program, the couple’s audience goes up over the course of the show, but alas, the opposite happened after it was revealed they visited Trump. Almost immediately after the announcement viewers switched off the show. During the 6 a.m. viewing block the “Morning Joe” only drew in 839,000 totals viewers and 113,000 in the coveted 25-54 demographic. And that was only the beginning of the big plunge.
Viewership soon dropped over the next hour to 694,000 and 38 percent in the demo. That’s going to leave a mark.
That hour-to-hour dropoff, according to Nielsen, was based on the “live plus same day” ratings — which track both live viewership and those who watch the program later via DVR. The Nov. 18 telecast had an unusually high number of “time-shifted” viewers who watched via recording the hour that the Morning Joe hosts announced the Mar-a-Lago visit. While 426,000 viewers tuned in live to watch the 6 a.m. hour, another 413,000 checked it out later in the day on DVR. The DVR audience for the first hour was 77 percent higher than the week before. Subsequent hours for that broadcast saw much smaller “time-shifted” viewership numbers.
While getting ripped left and right by their critics, Scarborough and Brzezinski brushed off the accusations being thrown at them.
“I saw for the first time what a massive disconnect there was between social media and the real world because we were flooded with phone calls from people all day, literally around the world—all very positive, very supportive,” Scarborough remarked in a comment aimed at viewers on Tuesday.
“They need FEMA there at this point—that’s the level of disaster they created,” one rival network executive told media reporter Oliver Darcy about the mess Morning Joe needs to clean up with its audience. Even some MSNBC colleagues have slammed the stars’ “cowardice,” with host Katie Phang tweeting: “Normalizing Trump is a bad idea. Period.”
However, a number of sources who know the couple had a conversation with CNN and said they are worried about MAGA taking revenge on them for their reporting lie upon lie against the president-elect and his supporters.
“According to two sources with direct knowledge of the matter, Scarborough and Brzezinski were credibly concerned that they could face governmental and legal harassment from the incoming Trump administration,” Brian Stelter explained.
Puck’s Dylan Byers added that the pair’s fears that Trump would seek revenge “became far more acute” once MAGA firebrand Matt Gaetz was nominated as attorney general. Especially since former Trump chief strategist Steve Bannon immediately boasted that Gaetz would go after their network for trying “to destroy” the incoming president.
Brzezinski and Scarborough “are petrified of retribution and of Gaetz opening an investigation” into the baseless conspiracy theory that Scarborough murdered an intern in 2001, according to Byers. After Trump’s once-cozy relationship with the MSNBC power couple soured following his first election victory, the president-elect repeatedly peddled the unhinged story — apparently at the urging of Gaetz. A network spokesperson disputed this characterization and denied it.
The mainstream media is quickly becoming obsolete. People are sick of the propaganda. We all know these folks are liars. If their lips are moving, they are pushing fake news. Most younger people these days prefer to get their news from podcasts and trust those hosts far more than talking heads on television.
It’s time to pay the piper, to admit defeat. Wave the white flag.
Or, at the very least, stop producing propaganda and create news products worth consuming.