Staff at the left-leaning MSNBC are furious at network executives for axing “Morning Joe” this week, accusing two executives of “coddling” former President Donald Trump to appease him.
“There’s a level of hate at this company that I’ve never seen before,” he said, directed at NBCU News Group Chairman Cesar Conde and MSNBC President Rashida Jones over the decision to skip Joe Scarborough and his co-host wife, Mika Brzezinski, on Monday. A source told The Wrap:.
The decision to remove them following Saturday’s assassination attempt was “clearly a deliberate pandering to Trump and his allies” and an attempt to “ingratiate itself with the Trump campaign,” the source added.
At least two others with knowledge of the situation agreed with that assessment, saying executives at Comcast-owned broadcasters seemed resigned to the inevitability of Trump winning a second term in office, given his commanding lead over President Joe Biden in recent polls.
The Post has reached out to MSNBC for comment.
An MSNBC spokesperson told TheWrap that “all programming decisions are made by News Group,” the division Conde leads within NBCUniversal that includes NBC News, CNBC, MSNBC, NBC News Now, Telemundo and the local stations.
The network said the decision was made to replace regular programming across all platforms with continuing breaking news in the wake of the assassination attempt.
Another source defended the move to take “Morning Joe” off the air, calling it a “simple news decision.”
CNN reported that MSNBC executives decided to pull Scarborough, Brzezinski and other frequent Democratic commentators from the show on Monday, citing concerns that they might make inappropriate remarks.
An NBCUniversal spokesperson denied the report.
“Given the severity and complexity of this incident, NBC News, NBC News NOW and MSNBC are continuing to broadcast breaking news coverage from Saturday night,” a spokesperson told The Post on Monday.
When Scarborough returned to the MSNBC airwaves with colleagues on Tuesday morning, he criticized management and implicitly threatened to resign if the same thing were to happen again in the future.
“The next time someone tells us that News Feed is going to replace us, we’ll be sitting on our chairs,” Scarborough said Tuesday.
“And we’ll either be in charge of the news feed or we’ll have someone else host the show.”
The former Republican congressman from Florida said he was “very disappointed” by the move to end his show, a sentiment shared by many at the network, according to The Wrap.
Scarborough, a frequent target of Biden’s attention, on Thursday called on the aging president to halt his reelection campaign amid signs of declining cognitive abilities and sagging approval ratings.
