Morning Joe ratings have taken a nose-dive as hosts Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski face a backlash for meeting with Donald Trump.
During Monday’s show, the hosts revealed that they had traveled to Mar-a-Lago on Friday to “restart communications” with the president-elect before he takes office, marking their first face-to-face meeting in seven years.
Scarborough and Brzezinski have been highly critical of Trump, and so their shock announcement was met with criticism from fellow MSNBC colleagues, media pundits and political figures.
Now, new data from Nielsen reveals that it may have also hurt the show’s ratings.
Morning Joe airs for four hours each morning between 6 a.m. and 10 a.m. The cable news show is typically said to garner viewers hour over hour, according to Mediate.
Nielsen data shows that 56 minutes after the hosts began explaining their trip to the Trump residence, viewing figures began to tumble.
Between 7 a.m. and 8 a.m., they had fallen 17 percent from 839,000 to 694,000. Among the 25- to 54-year-old age group, viewing figures plummeted by 38 percent.
During the 8 a.m. to 9 a.m. hour, the show briefly bounced back with 775,000 viewers but, from 9 a.m. to 10 a.m., the numbers dropped slightly again to 770,000.
The program’s X channel has also turned off all its comments, although it is not clear whether this is related to the announcement of the meeting.
The hosts have been facing backlash with Jon Stewart of The Daily Show calling them out for meeting Trump after recently comparing him to Adolf Hitler.
Trump’s former presidential rival Nikki Haley also described it as a stunt to bolster MSNBC’s ratings, adding that “they realized they needed Trump for their survival”.
MSNBC host Katie Phang made a more indirect jibe at Scarborough and Brzezinski. “Normalizing Trump is a bad idea,” she wrote on X. “Period.”
During Monday morning’s show, Brzezinski explained her rationale behind the meeting.
“For those asking why we would go speak to the president-elect during such fraught times, especially between us, I guess I would ask back, why wouldn’t we?” she said.
The husband and wife duo said they spoke to Trump about “abortion, mass deportation, threats of… retribution against political opponents and media outlets”.
Scarborough chimed in that “we didn’t see eye-to-eye on a lot of issues, and we told him so.”
Trump, however, told Fox News that the exchange was “extremely cordial.”
“In many ways, it’s too bad that it wasn’t done long ago,” Trump said, adding that it is “very important, if not vital, to have a free, fair and open media or press.”
