Power-sniffing Washington Post political reporter Ben Terris interviewed the Morning Joe crew for a Wednesday front-pager in the Style section on their cozy relationship with the president-elect. The headline was "For Joe, Trump tunes in." Terris highlighted criticism from the left (and kooky left), not the right, about their closeness to Trump.
It’s fun to see Scarborough attack Andrea Mitchell and Chris Matthews for having close Democratic friends. But the most mysterious quote was Mika Brzezinski denying her team can be defined as journalists:
It’s an odd position, advising and reporting upon a president, sometimes on the very same topic. It’s engendered some bad feelings within NBC News, and it put targets on the backs of Scarborough and his longtime co-host Mika Brzezinski. Trump has referred to the duo as “supporters” and thanked them for helping make him “almost as a legendary figure.”
CNN rival Chris Cuomo called them “boosters”; liberal MSNBC alumnus Keith Olbermann compared the host to Franz von Papen, the German chancellor who eased Hitler’s rise to power. [!]
Scarborough views the criticism as “hypocritical,” he said. “Andrea Mitchell is friends with everyone in D.C. Chris Matthews is friends with people who have run for president of the United States.” No one seemed to mind, he said, that he [Matthews] had off-the-record conversations with President Obama or considers Obama’s campaign strategist David Axelrod a friend.
So “why in the world,” he complained during an interview at their 30 Rockefeller Center studio, “would this suddenly concern people?”
“It’s because they are unfair and mean and jealous,” Brzezinski said as she slid into a seat next to him
She maintains that just because they build sources and conduct interviews with newsmakers doesn’t mean they should be held to the rigid standards of journalism. “If you're going to call us journalists,” said Brzezinski, who came up through the ranks as a CBS reporter before joining the pundit class, “you can take every tenet of journalism and show that we’re breaking it.”
I don’t think that’s a sentence you’ll see in an MSNBC promo. Terris wisecracks that finally, Scarborough’s massive ego and his actual influence have aligned:
Scarborough insists this is nothing new for him, that the nation’s “influencers” have always watched his show. It’s a studied bit of nonchalance from a host who has never been known for his humility. But for once, it suddenly seems possible that Scarborough’s levels of ego and clout may be in alignment.
“Trump has been watching Joe for 15 years,” Willie Geist, one of Scarborough’s co-hosts, said in a phone interview. “He got his sense of politics and the world from Morning Joe.”
Except Morning Joe has only been on for nine years. (Before that, he was on at night with Scarborough Country.) It’s more than a bit insulting to insist Trump had no sense of “politics and the world” until he was 61.
