Tuning in to MSNBC this morning, interested to get the take of Joe Scarborough and his cohort of fellow Trump haters on the attempted assassination, it was surprising to find that the show had been pre-empted in favor of generic coverage hosted by Ana Cabrera.
What was behind the decision to yank Joe and Mika off the air? CNN's Oliver Darcy, perhaps gloating over the temporary suspension of its early-morning rivals, ran an article on the matter, "‘Morning Joe’ pulled from air Monday because of Trump shooting," that included this line [emphasis added]:
"A person familiar with the matter told CNN that the decision was made to avoid a scenario in which one of the show’s stable of two dozen-plus guests might make an inappropriate comment on live television that could be used to assail the program and network as a whole."
A likely explanation. But odd that the unidentified source said that the concerns about an "inappropriate comment" centered on the show's regular guests. The biggest danger of someone popping off might surely have come from Scarborough himself.
After all, Scarborough is Biden's informal adviser, who boasts spending hours at a time with him. And Scarborough's the guy who rarely gets through a show without repeatedly calling Trump a fascist. And who maintains a drumbeat of condemnation of Trump as a threat to end American democracy. Not to mention Mika Brzezinski, a dyed-in-the-wool Democrat and fierce critic of Trump in her own right.
Darcy called the Trump-will-end-democracy hype just "hard-knuckled reporting" on the future:
In the wake of the attempt on Trump’s life, some of the former president’s supporters have vehemently criticized the press and liberal media commentators for their hard-knuckled reporting, which has sounded the alarm on what four more years under the former president would look like.
In contrast with MSNBC, over on CNN Kasie Hunt was at her regular early-morning post. Perhaps a reflection of the fact that while she has her liberal moments, she is generally more even-handed than the wild-eyed liberal partisans over at Morning Joe.
For better or worse, it appears that Morning Joe will be back on the air on Tuesday. We'll be watching, looking to see if Scarborough & Co. can restrain their Trump-bashing enthusiasm.
Note: As mentioned, Ana Cabrera has been hosting the coverage this morning at MSNBC. And as NewsBusters has documented, as here, here, and here, she herself is another standard-issue media liberal.
