“Our integrity is on the line!” one MSNBC host told me the other day, employing genuine if well-rehearsed urgency. This was a week ago, during the first wave of the Great Democratic Panic, when the intraparty battle lines over Joe Biden’s fitness for office were still calcifying. Yes, many of the most notable members of the liberal punditocracy—Tom Friedman, Nick Kristof, David Remnick, the Pod Save America crew, the Times editorial board, etcetera—had already staked out positions and called on the president to step aside. George Stephanopoulos, who had sat face-to-face with Biden, had also inadvertently admitted to the world that he didn’t believe the president could serve another four years. Meanwhile, the Democrats’ anxiety was metastasizing with each of Biden’s wince-inducing public appearances, the White House was tripping over itself to evade a newly animated press corps, and almost all the polls were starting to trend in the wrong direction.
For the MSNBC host, however, “integrity” meant being honest with the network’s very liberal and highly activated viewers about this situation—that Biden was fucked, the party was fucked, that the various options were neither easy nor good—and not pretending to live in some alternate reality where none of this was happening, “like Fox News,” as this person put it. Unfortunately, this was proving to be a challenge for some colleagues. Most hosts at the network instinctually wanted to cover the facts, this person said—the anxiety, the polls, the growing chorus of Democratic lawmakers calling for a new candidate—but they also knew that doing so would draw the ire of their most loyal viewers. “If I even cover a single poll that’s bad for Biden, I am going to get raked over the coals on Twitter,” the host said. “Viewers hate this.”
On the airwaves that day, MSNBC’s Nicolle Wallace betrayed that inherent tension during a segment that showed Biden dragging down congressional Democrats in Wisconsin. “I know how difficult this story is for my audience,” she said. “But I’m not going to shield anyone from the news.” At the same time, some network contributors and guests privately noted what one of them described as a “Soviet Russia”-style scenario where panelists would talk during the commercial break about the president’s need to step aside and the “whispered terror about Biden losing and Trump instituting a gulag,” only to go back on air and offer a far more measured and hopeful assessment of the Democrats’ prospects. Indeed, the contrast between the private and public conversation within 30 Rock have at times mirrored, in many ways, the one taking place on Capitol Hill.
The ‘Morning Joe’ Incident
MSNBC is a network of talent-led fiefdoms. Unlike CNN, which has a more unified and top-down editorial cohesion, the tone and tenor of MSNBC’s coverage often depends more on each specific host. One can reckon with the Democratic panic attack with Wallace & Co. in the early evening, only to return after dinner to find Lawrence O’Donnell reliably shaming all the party bed-wetters while criticizing “a very badly reported” New York Times story and the “hysteria” of a press corps pursuing answers about the president’s health.
Broadly speaking, however, the majority of MSNBC hosts—Psaki, Wagner, etcetera—have offered a pretty honest account of where things stand in their party. And despite concerns over integrity, the network has handled a complex, nuanced situation with a fair amount of aplomb. For its sins, however, MSNBC has seen its recent leads over CNN evaporate, especially as the latter network rides the tide of a very newsy news cycle. For the week of July 8, which included the attempted assassination of Trump, CNN soundly beat MSNBC in the 25-to-54 demo and nearly matched it in total viewers. So far during this week’s G.O.P. convention, CNN is outperforming MSNBC on both fronts. (Fox News continues to beat both networks combined in almost any given hour).
Of course, the most mystifying chapter of MSNBC’s post-debate angst saga has been playing out on Morning Joe, where Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski have sided firmly with the president and against his detractors. On the one hand, that’s unsurprising given the obvious pro-Biden bias the two have demonstrated in recent years. On the other hand, it’s quite surprising: Historically, Morning Joe has been a forum for the onetime G.O.P. congressman to chew over and yell about the day’s issues with pragmatic, mostly left-of-center Beltway veterans, set the day’s agenda, and advance more centrist wisdom about the state of play in American politics.
On the morning after the debate, Scarborough seemed to channel that Beltway wisdom when he noted that, despite his love of Biden, no Fortune 500 corporation would keep a C.E.O. who had given such a disastrous performance. Days later, however, he apparently reconsidered and reverted to his familiar pro-Biden posture. Like O’Donnell, he is now waging a war against the president’s critics—“The Democrats have to either fish or cut bait,” he said Wednesday morning—and critiqued members of the liberal punditocracy, most notably the Pod Save crew, for refusing to fall in line. Earlier this week, Scarborough even dinged his own colleague Lester Holt for engaging in “phony moral relativism” because he had pressed Biden to explain a recent remark about putting Trump in a “bull’s-eye.”
Nevertheless, the show continues to be a highly relevant theater in the wake of newsmaking events. Since the debate, Biden has called in to do an interview, and Nancy Pelosi used the show to carefully encourage Biden to rethink his decision to stay in the race. Most recently, though, Scarborough & Co. made news for their network’s counterintuitive and stunning decision to preempt Morning Joe on the Monday following the attempted Trump assassination. Indeed, MSNBC long ago ceded four hours of its morning, and its network identity, to Joe and Mika, who often have to vamp through slower news cycles. Why pull them from the air after such a consequential and historic moment?
A day earlier, I’m told, NBC News Group chairman Cesar Conde had determined that, in light of the seismic and sensitive nature of the Butler attack, he would preempt all of MSNBC’s perspective programming with the rolling news coverage from the NBC broadcast feed. The news division communicated the decision as a consensus that had been reached not only by Conde and MSNBC president Rashida Jones, but also Joe and Mika, themselves. This surprised some people around the show, but the operating assumption was that the special live report would be anchored by Holt and Savannah Guthrie, or something in that vein.
Instead, when the Scarborough crew turned on their televisions on Monday morning, they saw a simulcast of the morning show anchored by the younger and relatively inexperienced hosts Savannah Sellers and Joe Fryer on NBC News Now, the network’s second-tier streaming service. Once that show was over, MSNBC immediately returned to its regularly scheduled programming, leaving Joe, Mika, and Willie chafing over their singular omission from the network’s coverage of a major historical event—first privately, and then publicly the following morning when all three of them laid into their bosses for the decision. “Next time we are told there is going to be a news feed replacing us, we will be in our chairs,” Scarborough said. “And the news feed will be us, or they can get somebody else to host the show.”
One network source suggested to CNN that the move had been made for fear that one of the show’s guests might utter an inappropriate comment that would expose the network to criticism. The truth, however, was more mundane—obviously, whatever comments a guest might make on Monday could also be made on Tuesday—but it hinted at a more substantive management problem: Conde had been piqued by the idea of mobilizing his news platforms to cover a major news event just as CNN might, only to be reminded that the network’s real value proposition was the perspective itself. After blowback from viewers who wanted Joe and Mika, the network made the call to revert to its regularly scheduled programming, which continued Tuesday morning with the Morning Joe hosts dragging their bosses on live TV. The episode immediately called to mind MSNBC’s on-air mutiny following Conde’s ill-fated decision to hire former R.N.C. Chair Ronna McDaniel as a contributor.
Conde may be an accomplished executive trying to navigate a thorny period, but he apparently missed the business school class that explains how to level with talent before they see their subordinates sucking up their air time. Alas, no one ever said the managed decline of cable news was going to be easy—the shift from linear to digital, the balance between perspective and straight news, integrity and ratings—but this is one of those increasingly rare moments when it matters most.
