At the crossroads of news and opinion, Morning Joe hosts grapple with the fallout from Trump’s meeting

One of the striking things about how furiously many people reacted to the news last week that MSNBC’s “Morning Joe” hosts Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski had met with President-elect Donald Trump was how strange their defenders sounded.

“Critics do NOT think that all of us in the media need to know more so we can share/report more,” Jim VandeHei, co-founder of Axios and Politico, said on social media.

It would be journalistic negligence for the hosts of a morning television news program not to attend a meeting with the president-elect, wouldn’t it? But Morning Joe is not traditional journalism, and last week’s incident is a stark illustration of a broader trend of impartial fact-finding being displaced in the marketplace by opinionated news and the expectations it generates.

Scarborough, a former congressman, and his wife, veteran journalist Brzezinski, haven’t just been talking about the presidential campaign since their four-hour weekday. They tirelessly and emotionally defended Democrat Kamala Harris, comparing Trump to a would-be fascist.

“They position themselves as bastions of integrity against a would-be dictator,” says Frank Sesno, a former CNN Washington bureau chief who is now a professor at George Washington University’s School of Media and Public Affairs. “What fans see is a daily procession of people on the show constantly talking about the evil deeds of Donald Trump, and then Joe and Mika show up and have tea with the guy.”

Fast and intense audience reaction

The reaction on social media was immediate and intense. “You don’t have to talk to Hitler to cover him effectively,” was one of the nicer messages.

What’s more telling is that people responded with action.

Last Monday, “Morning Joe” had 770,000 viewers, and its viewership – like many shows on MSNBC – was less than the year’s average of 1.09 million because some of the network’s liberal viewers turned away after they considered disappointing election results. This is the day Scarborough and Brzezinski announced they had met with Trump the previous Friday.

Morning Joe’s viewership had fallen to 680,000 by Tuesday, according to the Nielsen Company, and was down to 647,000 viewers on Wednesday. It rose to 707,000 on Thursday. That’s just three days of data, but it’s the statistic TV executives are thinking about.

“Audiences in a polarized news-industrial complex have become unforgiving,” says Kate O’Brien, the retiring head of news at E.W. Scripps Co.

The Washington Post learned this last month when it lost about 250,000 subscribers (presumably most of them non-Trump supporters) after announcing it would not endorse the presidential candidate. A draft editorial supporting Harris was already in the works.

Mixing news and opinion is nothing new; many US newspapers in the 1800s were overtly partisan. But for much of the last century, there have been vigorous attempts to separate the two. Broadcast television, licensed to serve the public interest, has created fact-based newsrooms. What began to change this was Fox News’s success in creating a conservative audience that felt underserved and undervalued.

There is now a vibrant industry catering to people who want their views represented and are less interested in reporting or any content that contradicts them.

The most noticeable trend in 2024 campaign coverage has been the decline in influence of so-called legacy news brands in favor of media like podcasts that offer publicity-hungry politicians a friendly, if not supportive, home. Trump, for example, visited with several podcasters, including the influential Joe Rogan, who rewarded Trump with an endorsement.

“I won’t even call it journalism,” Sesno says. “It’s storytelling.”

Megyn Kelly’s journey over the past decade is one illustration of how opinion can pay off in today’s climate. She was once one of Fox News’ most aggressive reporters, but during the 2015 debate she angered Trump with a pointed question about his treatment of women. She switched to the legacy edition of NBC News, but that didn’t help her. She has since launched a thriving podcast with conservative and Trump-friendly views.

Among cable news brands, CNN has gone out of its way to project an image of impartiality, even if many conservatives disagree. So the ratings drop was notable: The network’s 4.7 million audience for election night coverage was essentially half the 9.1 million it had on the same night in 2020.

O’Brien is leaving Scripps at the end of the year as the company phases out its 24-hour television news network after finding that impartiality is difficult. Scripps continues to produce streaming news.

What place does nonpartisan news have in today’s environment?

It is in this environment that Scarborough and Brzezinski work on Morning Joe.

“They are very talented presenters,” Sesno says. “But they are not on the front lines doing journalism and seeking the truth the way a professional journalist does.”

Hours after the hosts announced their meeting with Trump, fellow MSNBC lawyer and correspondent Cathy Fung said on X that “normalizing Trump is a bad idea.” Scarborough said that’s not what he was trying to do.

“It is not up to you or your corrupt industry to ‘normalize’ or not ‘normalize’ any politician who wins a fair election,” Christina Pushaw, a combative aide to Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, responded to Fang. “The Americans have had their say; Trump will be your president in January whether you “normalize” it or not. I would advise journalists to accept reality.”

Warning: Sesno is among those who think the “Morning Joe” hosts did the right thing.

Whatever the motives (and some believe fears that the Trump administration could make their lives very difficult were on the hosts’ minds), opening the line of communication to ensure the politics-based show isn’t completely cut off from, he said , the presidential administration’s thinking makes business sense. A little humility won’t hurt.

Even if her own work has proven it’s not good business right now, Scripps’ O’Brien has seen enough focus groups of people yearning for a more traditional journalism-based approach to believe it’s important.

“I think there’s still a need for nonpartisan news,” says a former longtime ABC News producer, “and perhaps what will bring it back to where it was before is exhaustion from the hyper-polarized climate we now live in.” ” “

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David Bauder covers media for the AP. Follow him in http://x.com/dbauder.