MSNBC's “Morning Joe” co-hosts Joe Scarborough and Mika Brezinski violated some of the cardinal rules of journalism. Journalists, so those maxims go, should never make themselves the story or get too close to those they are covering.
During a 24-minute segment, Scarborough and Brezinski admitted they “went to Mar-a-Lago to meet with President-elect Trump on the previous Friday.” Scarborough said they “talked about a lot of issues…It should come as no surprise to people who watch the show that we didn’t see eye-to-eye…, and we told him so.”
Brezinski then chimed in, reading from a carefully prepared script, “What we agreed on was restart communications.” She compared the meeting with Trump to meetings her late father, and former National Security Advisor to President Jimmy Carter, would have with world leaders with whom he disagreed.
Brezinski reported that Trump was “cheerful, upbeat, and interested in finding common ground with Democrats…” She claimed it is “time to do something different…not just to talk about Donald Trump, but to talk with him.”
This unexpected announcement ignored the threat Trump poses to the United States. It focused on why it was OK for Scarborough and Brezinski to pilgrimage to Trump’s Florida estate.
As a long-time viewer of “Morning Joe,” I am quite used to Scarborough and Brezinski's self-aggrandizing soliloquies. But I was still shocked by Monday’s self-dramatizing use of their platform.
In truth, this was their Kevin McCarty moment. Recall that McCarthy, then House Minority Leader, denounced Trump in the immediate aftermath of January 6. However, two weeks later, McCarthy made his own journey to Mar-a-Lago.
He got photographed, smiling with the man who he had said “bears responsibility” for what happened when Trump’s supporters stormed the Capitol. McCarthy had even told his Republican colleagues that he would urge Trump to resign.
When McCarthy met Trump, all that was quickly forgotten.
Like McCarthy, Scarborough and Brezinski want us to forget. As Megyn Kelly noted, prior to their meeting with the president-elect, they “repeatedly slammed Trump as a racist and fascist.” This radical inconsistency is why Kelly was right to brand their sit down with Trump an “absurd farce.”
Why would Scarborough and Brezinski make such a big deal about their off-the-recording sit down with someone they once regarded as a racist and fascist? There are many possibilities.
One possibility is that they wanted to assure their viewers that they would again be in the charmed circle of Washington insiders who have direct access to Trump. Kelly reminds us that “Morning Joe” helped "pump up Trump’s first run for the White House starting in 2015 when he consistently called into their show. She even played a clip of Scarborough saying he would be open to serving as Trump’s running mate.” Access to power, Kelly says, is “everything” to Joe Scarborough.
A second possible reason for their meeting with Trump is that Scarborough and Brezinski want to mend fences with Trump because they fear becoming targets of the president-elect’s promised campaign of retribution against his critics and political opponents. “According to two sources with direct knowledge of the matter,” CNN reports, “Scarborough and Brzezinski were credibly concerned that they could face governmental and legal harassment from the incoming Trump administration.”
CNN says, “Knowing that Trump has threatened retribution against his perceived political opponents and that Trump has promoted lies about Scarborough and Brzezinski in the past, the MSNBC hosts decided to reach out to the president-elect.”
A third possibility is that the on-the-air revelation of the Mar-a-Lago meeting was the price they had to pay before the president-elect would agree to see them. Exacting such a price would appeal to someone like Trump who wants to make people kowtow to him publicly.
Trump seems to take special pleasure when he can do so after he has mocked, insulted, or humiliated such a person. And he certainly has gone out of the way to mock, insult, and humiliate Scarborough and Brezinski.
According to NPR, seven years ago, “President Trump unleashed one of the most vitriolic insults of his presidency… saying MSNBC 'Morning Joe' host Mika Brzezinski was ‘bleeding badly from a face-lift’ while at his Palm Beach, Fla., resort for New Year's Eve. He also described her as ‘low I.Q. Crazy Mika.’"
At the same time, Trump labeled Scarborough “Psycho Joe” and suggested that Scarborough had pathetically overstayed his welcome in Mar-a-Lago the previous New Year’s Eve.
Or, to offer another example of Trump’s treatment of “Morning Joe’s” co-hosts, four years ago he suggested that “MSNBC’s Joe Scarborough had committed murder.” In May 2020, Trump took to Twitter to ask, “When will they open a Cold Case on the Psycho Joe Scarborough matter in Florida? Did he get away with murder? Some people think so,” Trump wrote. “Why did he leave Congress so quietly and quickly? Isn’t it obvious? What’s happening now? A total nut job!”
None of those insults or innuendos stood in the way of Scarborough and Brezinski’s effort to make peace with Trump.
Of course, there is nothing wrong in trying to repair a breach. The problem is Scarborough and Brezinski have had a field day criticizing others, like Kevin McCarthy, or Texas Senator Ted Cruz, who have done the same thing after Trump insulted them or their families.
Scarborough called McCarthy “sad and pathetic” for not criticizing Trump after the then-former president met with a prominent white nationalist. He was quick to attribute McCarthy’s silence to the fact that he “thinks his support depends on having white nationalists and supporters of neo-Nazis voting for him for speaker of the House.”
In 2020, Scarborough savaged Cruz in a series of tweets “accusing him of selling his 'soul' by supporting Donald Trump after the president 'called your wife ugly and said your dad killed JFK.'”
Now Scarborough and Brezinski have followed in Cruz’s footsteps.
Whatever their motives, their hypocrisy undermines the credibility of the program they host. But more importantly, it feeds into the Trumpian narrative that the press, the media, and journalists cannot be trusted.
There is ample evidence of the hold that the Trumpian narrative now has on the public. Last month, Gallup reported that “Americans continue to register record-low trust in the mass media, with 31% expressing a ‘great deal’ or ‘fair amount’ of confidence in the media to report the news ‘fully, accurately and fairly,’ similar to last year’s 32%. Americans’ trust in the media — such as newspapers, television and radio….For the third consecutive year, more U.S. adults have no trust at all in the media (36%) than trust it a great deal or fair amount.”
Journalism professor Jesse Holcomb explains, “Midway through the 20th century, the news media was among the most trusted institutions in the United States. Today, it sits near the bottom of the list, outflanked only by Congress in most surveys.” Holcomb continues, “It’s one of those social facts that elicits a sense of self-evidence (“We needed a survey for that?”). Everybody knows the media has a credibility problem.”
Part of that credibility problem can be attributed to what Dr. Jill Stein, the Green Party’s presidential nominee, calls the astounding “hypocrisy in mainstream media.” Scarborough and Brezinski exemplify that in spades.
They should not have been surprised that viewers would see through their charade and be put off by it. And see through it, they did. That is why “Morning Joe” took an immediate ratings hit following Joe and Mika’s Monday morning revelation about the Trump meeting.
Beyond Scarborough and Brezinski’s astounding hypocrisy, by meeting with Trump they dishonored the profession they purport to be a part of. That is made clear by the words of former Supreme Court Justice Hugo Black, long one of the nation’s greatest defenders of the press. In 1971, Black argued that the press's job is “to serve the governed, not the governors…. And paramount among the responsibilities of a free press is the duty to prevent any part of the government from deceiving the people.” To do so depended on what Black called “courageous reporting,”
In the end, there was nothing courageous in Scarborough, and Brezinski sought to get back in the good graces of a man who had made a career of “deceiving the people.”
That is why “Morning Joe” must go.
