The Media Research Center’s chief hate-watcher of “Morning Joe,” Mark Finkelstein, was gleeful he didn’t have to do his job for one day, as he described it in a July 15 post:
Tuning in to MSNBC this morning, interested to get the take of Joe Scarborough and his cohort of fellow Trump haters on the attempted assassination, it was surprising to find that the show had been pre-empted in favor of generic coverage hosted by Ana Cabrera.
What was behind the decision to yank Joe and Mika off the air? CNN’s Oliver Darcy, perhaps gloating over the temporary suspension of its early-morning rivals, ran an article on the matter, “‘Morning Joe’ pulled from air Monday because of Trump shooting,” that included this line [emphasis added]:
“A person familiar with the matter told CNN that the decision was made to avoid a scenario in which one of the show’s stable of two dozen-plus guests might make an inappropriate comment on live television that could be used to assail the program and network as a whole.”
A likely explanation. But odd that the unidentified source said that the concerns about an “inappropriate comment” centered on the show’s regular guests. The biggest danger of someone popping off might surely have come from Scarborough himself.
After all, Scarborough is Biden’s informal adviser, who boasts spending hours at a time with him. And Scarborough’s the guy who rarely gets through a show without repeatedly calling Trump a fascist. And who maintains a drumbeat of condemnation of Trump as a threat to end American democracy. Not to mention Mika Brzezinski, a dyed-in-the-wool Democrat and fierce critic of Trump in her own right.
Finkelstein failed to mention that his employer normally distrusts anonymous sources (ones that criticize conservatives, anyway). Still,, he lamented (even though his job depends on this), “For better or worse, it appears that Morning Joe will be back on the air on Tuesday. We’ll be watching, looking to see if Scarborough & Co. can restrain their Trump-bashing enthusiasm.”
Geoffrey Dickens followed up with a compilation Scarborough-hating post later in the day:
There’s a reason even MSNBC executives decided to keep Morning Joe off the air — in the aftermath of the failed assassination attempt of President Donald Trump.
They were terrified that Joe Scarborough, Mika Brzezinski or any other of their regular guests would call Trump a “threat” to democracy, label him “fascist” or even compare him to “Hitler.”
When Joe Scarborough did indeed return and complained about the situation, Finkelstein’s job was saved by devoting a July 16 post to it:
Don’t let the door hit ya on the way out, Joe!
Mika Brzezinski began today’s Morning Joe with an apparent expression of discontent about the show having been yanked off the air yesterday, pointedly saying “It is VERY good to be here.”That apparent discontent become absolutely explicit an hour later in the show. Joe Scarborough in effect accused the NBC News suits of having lied to them in saying that they’d been taken off the air because there’d be one unified feed across all their networks yesterday. That didn’t turn out to be so.
Scarborough ended with what sounded like a threat to quit, saying:
“Next time we’re told there’s going to be a news feed replacing us, we will be in our chairs. And the news feed will be us, or THEY CAN GET SOMEBODY ELSE TO HOST THE SHOW.”
Note: Mika supplied some unintentional humor, at one point claiming that Morning Joe is “the place where you can go to have the hard conversations. In a civil way.”
Finbkelstein then quoted right-wing media critic Joe Concha (whose ideology was undisclosed by Finkelstein) snottily calling Scarborough and Brzezinski “petulant hosts” and demanding, ” Fire them. They can’t be trusted and are openly insubordinate. The numbers aren’t even good anyway.”
Finkelstein’s boss got in on the Scarborough-bashing as well. MRC chief Brent Bozell spewed the same day on Mark Levin’s radio show: “Isn’t it telling that MSNBC would not trust its own anchors this morning, to have them on the air? They couldn’t trust Joe Scarborough and Mika not to say something that was purely incendiary. They couldn’t trust their own staff. What does that tell you about how out of control the media have gotten?” It’s also telling that Bozell will only appear these days on right-wing outlets that will serve him only the softest of softball questions and ever talk about things like his son going to prison for taking part in the Capitol riot (news of which his organization has completely censored).