MSNBC viewers are still not tuning in to watch “Morning Joe” after it was revealed that show hosts Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski made a trip to Mar-A-Lago in Florida to have a meeting with President-elect Donald Trump. To be fair, the average blue-haired, tattooed, imitation tackle box — face piercings — liberal that watches the show aren’t exactly high caliber, quality audience members, so the fact they’re holding a grudge over a move made to try and heal the divide in our country says more about them than the hosts of the program.
Then again, was the visit really about bringing the nation together? Maybe it was really about groveling before Trump in the hope that they wouldn’t ultimately lose their jobs once he becomes president? Guess we’ll have to wait and see which is true.
Check out more 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.
It’s common for the couple’s program to grow its viewing audience as the morning moves along, but that’s not what happened when the Mar-a-Lago visit was revealed. They immediately lost viewers following the announcement. During the 6 a.m. block, they only pulled in 839,000 viewers in total and then 113,000 in the 25-54 demographic. Things only got worse from there. Viewership declined over the next hour to 694,000 and 38 percent in the demo. Ouch.
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.
Many critics claimed the co-hosts were bending the knee and kissing the ring, with some even saying they were “double agents. However, both Scarborough and Brzezinski have shrugged off the wild accusations.
“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 said to the 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.”
But sources close to the married couple spoke with CNN and said the real reason for their trip to visit Trump was due to their fear of revenge against them for their biased reporting of the president-elect.
“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 said.
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.
I have no doubt in my mind there’s a reckoning coming for mainstream media outlets like MSNBC and CNN after the years and years of vile propaganda they’ve produced against Trump and his supporters. And as far as I’m concerned, you reap what you sow. I don’t feel sorry for these people at all. Neither should you. They’ve done nothing but lie to our faces and treat us like scum. They deserve whatever storm is on the way.
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