Morning Joe’s Mike Barnicle Fears for Cable News After Social Media Poll: ‘I Don’t Know How We Make Ourselves Relevant Again’

Morning Joe senior contributor Mike Barnicle admitted he fears for mainstream media after seeing a poll showing one in five Americans get their news from social media influencers.

According to data from Pew Research Center, nearly 40% of adults under 30 said they get their news from social media over more traditional sources. X remains the most-widely used platform followed by Instagram and YouTube.

“Mike, that’s the challenge, you grew up in a newsroom like Eugene grew up in a newsroom, I mean that’s a challenge for a lot of mainstream media sources is do they make themselves relevant again,” Morning Joe’s Joe Scarborough said on Tuesday after hearing the story. “Here, 20% of adults who actually get influencers on social media. Maybe somebody who makes baskets and while they’re making baskets, they look up and say, vote for candidate X.”

Barnicle admitted he doesn’t have a clue how cable news and mainstream media can compete with quick snippets on social media.

“I don’t know how we make ourselves relevant again because we can’t compete with 20 second snippets on an iPhone, walking up the street and getting your entire news digest of the day in less than a minute on your phone as you’re walking in a crowd with coffee in one hand and your phone in the other. I don’t know how we catch up to that,” he said.

MSNBC analyst and Pulitzer Prize winner Eugene Robinson took a slightly more optimistic tone, but admitted the view trends are not going the way of way they are at.

“The answer is, we don’t know how to compete with the social media basket making influencers or whatever, but we have to. And we’ve got to figure out ways to do it and maybe we make our own 20 second snippets and we meet viewers where they are,” he said. “We meet news consumers where they are because they’re not here, and that’s the problem.”

Watch above via MSNBC.