Based on Monday morning’s hour-by-hour ratings, Morning Joe viewers were not happy with Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski’s announcement that they met privately with President-Elect Donald Trump at Mar-a-Lago on Friday.
Shockwaves were felt throughout the political media world after two of Trump’s most influential and vocal critics revealed that they were pivoting from consistently covering Trump with dire warnings to a kinder and gentler approach after ostensibly making peace with the newly elected leader they’d regularly compared to Hitler.
David Gilmour summed up the segment that opened the 6 AM hour:
Brzezinski began on Monday by acknowledging that many viewers, spanning “regular citizens” and “political leaders” had expressed feeling “scared” and “dismayed” at Trump’s cabinet selections. As a result, she and Scarborough decided to reach out to Trump’s team to see if they could have “the opportunity to speak with the President-elect, himself.”
She continued: “On Friday, we were given the opportunity to do just that. Joe and I went to Mar-a-Lago to meet personally with President-elect Trump. It was the first time we have seen him in seven years.”
Scarborough, taking over the monologue to detail the conversation: “We talked about a lot of issues, including abortion, mass deportation, threats of political retribution against political opponents and media outlets. We talked about that a good bit.”
He added: “It will come as no surprise to anybody who watches this show, has watched it over the past year or over the past decade, that we didn’t see eye-to-eye on a lot of issues and we told him so.”
Brzezinski then said: “What we did agree on was to restart communications.”
Nearly immediately, there was a bipartisan backlash. The MSNBC morning show hosts’ stated goal of “time for a new approach” was openly derided as evidence that Scarborough and Brzezinski did not believe in the conviction of their previous criticisms. The criticism came from provocateurs and thought leaders from both ends of the political spectrum.
It turns out that MSNBC live plus same day television viewers tuned out over the next four hours. Nielsen ratings obtained by Mediaite show a significant drop in viewers in the 7 AM hour. Roughly 38% of the lucrative 25-54 demo also turned off MSNBC or switched to another network.
The industry standard for ratings is based on “live plus same-day” viewers, which includes anyone who will, say, pause a show and then return to watch it via DVR recording. Mediaite has obtained numbers that show “live viewership” of Morning Joe on Nov. 18 actually did increase over time, but the significant ratings fall off came largely from a decline on those who recorded the show via DVR — thus the decline in the live + same day numbers.
Morning Joe airs for four hours each morning, and given that people awaken and tune in to cable news at different times, the show regularly draws viewers hour over hour. The fact that people tuned out from the MSNBC morning show, and at such a significant clip, does not spell good fortune for the once influential opinion show that seems to have angered the anti-Trump resistance set and has long given up on the pro-Trump viewers going back roughly eight years.
Editor’s note: this post has been updated to reflect better live versus live plus same day viewers.
