One of the striking things about how furiously many people reacted to the news last week that MSNBC "Morning Joe" hosts Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski met with President-Elect Donald Trump was how quaint their defenders sounded.
"It is insane for critics to NOT think 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 malpractice for the hosts of a morning television news program not to take a meeting with a president-elect, right? But "Morning Joe" isn't traditional journalism, and last week's incident is a telling illustration of the broader trend of impartial fact-finding being crowded out in the marketplace by opinionated news and the expectations that creates.
Scarborough, a former congressman, and his wife, veteran newswoman Brzezinski, didn't just talk about the presidential campaign from their four-hour weekday perch. They tirelessly and emotionally advocated for Democrat Kamala Harris, likening Trump to a fascist-in-waiting.
"They have portrayed themselves as bastions of integrity standing up to a would-be dictator," says Frank Sesno, a former CNN Washington bureau chief now professor at George Washington University's school of media and public affairs. "What the followers see is the daily procession of people on the show constantly talking about the evils of Donald Trump and then Joe and Mika show up and have high tea with the guy."
A quick and intense blowback from viewers
The social media blowback was instant and intense. "You do not need to talk to Hitler to cover him effectively," was one of the nicer messages.
More telling is the people who have responded with action.
"Morning Joe" had 770,000 viewers last Monday, its audience — like many shows on MSNBC — down from its yearly average of 1.09 million because some of the network's liberal-leaning viewers have tuned away after what they regard as depressing election results. That's the day Scarborough and Brzezinski announced they had met with Trump the previous Friday.
By Tuesday, the "Morning Joe" audience had slipped to 680,000, according to the Nielsen company, and Wednesday's viewership was 647,000. Thursday rebounded to 707,000. It's only three days of data, but those are the kind of statistics about which television executives brood.
"The audience for the polarized news-industrial complex has become unforgiving," says Kate O'Brian, outgoing head of news of the E.W. Scripps Co.
The Washington Post learned this last month when it lost a reported 250,000 subscribers — presumably the bulk of them non-Trump supporters — after announcing it would not endorse a candidate for president. A draft of an editorial endorsing Harris had already been in the works.
Mixing news and opinion isn't new; many U.S. newspapers in the 1800s were unabashedly partisan. But for most of the past century, there was a vigorous effort to separate the two. Broadcast television, licensed to serve the public interest, built up fact-based news divisions. What began to change things was the success of Fox News in building a conservative audience that believed it was underserved and undervalued.
Now there's a vigorous industry catering to people who want to see their points of view reflected — and are less interested in reporting or any content that contradicts them.
The most notable trend in 2024 campaign coverage was the diminishing influence of so-called legacy news brands in favor of outlets like podcasts that offered publicity-hungry politicians a friendly, if not supportive, home. Trump, for example, visited several podcasters, including the influential Joe Rogan, who awarded Trump with an endorsement.
"I won't even call it journalism," Sesno says. "It's storytelling."
The past decade's journey of Megyn Kelly is one illustration of how opinion can pay off in today's climate. Once one of the more aggressive reporters at Fox News, she angered Trump in a 2015 debate with a pointed question about his treatment of women. She moved to the legacy outlet NBC News, but that didn't work for her. She has since started a flourishing podcast with conservative, and Trump-friendly, opinion.
Among cable TV-based news brands, CNN has tried hardest to present an image of impartiality, even if many conservatives disagree. So the collapse in its ratings has been noteworthy: the network's audience of 4.7 million people for its election night coverage was essentially half the 9.1 million people it had for the same night in 2020.
O'Brian is leaving Scripps at the end of the year because it is ending its 24-hour television news network after finding impartiality was a tough business. Scripps is continuing a streaming news product.
What's the place for non-partisan news in today's environment?
That's the environment Scarborough and Brzezinski work in on "Morning Joe."
"They are very talented show hosts," Sesno says. "But they are not out on the front lines doing journalism, seeking truth in the way that a professional journalist does."
Hours after the hosts' announcement that they had met with Trump, an MSNBC colleague, legal contributor and correspondent Katie Phang, said on X that "normalizing Trump is a bad idea." Scarborough had made a point of saying that was not what he was attempting to do.
"It's not up to you or your corrupt industry to 'normalize' or not 'normalize' any politician who wins an election fair & square," Christina Pushaw, the pugnacious aide to Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, replied to Phang. "Americans had their say; Trump will be your president come January whether you 'normalize' it or not. I would suggests journos should accept reality."
Quaintness alert: Sesno is among those who believe the "Morning Joe" hosts did the right thing.
Whatever the motivations — and there are some who believe that worries that a Trump administration could make life difficult very difficult for them was on the hosts' minds — opening a line of communication to ensure that a show based on politics is not completely cut off from the thinking of a presidential administration makes business sense, he says. A little humility doesn't hurt.
Even if her own job has proven that it's not a great business now, Scripps' O'Brian has seen enough focus groups of people who yearn for a more traditional journalism-based approach to believe in its importance.
"I think that there is still a need for nonpartisan news," says the former longtime ABC News producer, "and maybe what brings it back to where it used to be will be an exhaustion from the hyper-polarized climate that we currently live in."
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David Bauder writes about media for the AP. Follow him at http://x.com/dbauder.