Morning Joe ended a tumultuous week with a precipitous ratings drop. Since co-hosts Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski disclosed their in-person meeting with President-elect Donald Trump, the MSNBC morning show has seen a steady erosion in viewership.
While that dovetails with the larger post-Election Day ratings woes facing both MSNBC and CNN, it also suggests that the Morning Joe audience didn’t exactly embrace the duo’s argument that it was “time to do something different” in regards to covering Trump.
The controversy surrounding Scarborough and Brzezinski’s trip to the president-elect’s Florida headquarters started almost immediately after they disclosed the Mar-a-Lago meeting on Monday’s show. According to Nielsen Media Research data, 770,000 total viewers watched the Nov. 18 newscast. On Tuesday, though, only 680,000 total viewers tuned in for a -12% drop.
Wednesday’s show averaged 647,000, a slip of -5% compared to the previous day and -17% since Monday. A source at MSNBC notes to TVNewser that Morning Joe was up +4% in total viewers from Monday to Wednesday compared to the previous week, and that the newscast grew its total viewer audience in every hour from 6-10am across those two days.
Wednesday was also the day that Comcast announced the launch of SpinCo, a new publicly traded spinoff company built to house the corporate giant’s struggling cable networks—including MSNBC and CNBC. That would cleave both outlets from the main NBCUniversal News Group and require them to potentially build their own newsgathering operations from the ground-up.
Appearing on Morning Joe on Wednesday, CNBC co-host Andrew Ross Sorkin explained reasons to be optimistic about SpinCo. “MSNBC [and] CNBC produce extraordinary profits,” he remarked. “So the question is: If you could take that money that’s coming off of these channels and invest it in the businesses as an independent entity—what [does] that ultimately look like?”
SpinCo’s new leadership team—including CEO Mark Lazarus and CFO and COO Anand Kini—have been taking proactive steps to keep MSNBC in the fold ahead of the company’s launch, which is expected to take about a year. The Ankler correspondent Lachlan Cartwright recently reported that the network’s star anchor Rachel Maddow re-upped her deal, albeit with a $5 million pay cut according to his sources.
As of now, Scarborough and Brzezinski appear inclined to stick around as well. Even with its recent viewership decline, Morning Joe remains a familiar MSNBC brand that the network would likely want to hold onto as it enters a new era. And both hosts are standing by their decision to engage with Trump. On Tuesday’s show, Scarborough said that he’d noticed as “massive disconnect” between the social media reaction and what he was personally hearing from friends and colleagues.