Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski, hosts of MSNBC’s “Morning Joe,” expressed surprise and disappointment Tuesday after being told their show would not air Monday morning in the wake of the assassination attempt on former President Donald Trump.
Scarborough said his team had been told that all of NBC’s news programs would be sidelined to air special coverage of the attempt on Trump’s life. But, as it turned out, other NBC News programs like the “Today” show aired as usual. “Morning Joe” did not.
If something similar happened again, Scarborough said, “they can get somebody else to host the show.”
CNN reported that the reason was executives’ fears about what “Morning Joe” guests might say about Trump and that those comments could be used to disparage the entire network.
“We were told in no uncertain terms that on Sunday evening that there was going to be one news feed across all NBC News channels yesterday,” Scarborough said. “That did not happen. We don’t know why that didn’t happen.”
He went on to add, “We were very surprised. We were very disappointed. And if we had known that there wasn’t going to be the one news feed from NBC News across all NBC News channels, we obviously would have been in yesterday morning.”
Monday saw no shortage of news — in addition to continued coverage of the Trump shooting, the Republican National Convention kicked off four days of events in Milwaukee.
It is not the first time that NBC News’ top brass made decisions that left staff feeling uncomfortable. As CNN noted, in the wake of Hamas’ Oct. 7 attack on Israel, MSNBC quietly sidelined three of its Muslim anchors, including Mehdi Hasan, who then left the network in January.
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The 20-year-old gunman who tried to kill Trump on Saturday was shot and killed by law enforcement soon after he began shooting at the Pennsylvania stage where the former president was holding a campaign rally. His motives are still unclear.
One Trump supporter seated near the stage was killed in the shooting, while two others were seriously wounded.
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