Network insider blasts ‘Morning Joe’ hosts Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski as ‘childish and immature’
Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski may be more like former President Donald Trump than they’d like to admit.
“They have a flair for the dramatic,” a network insider told Page Six. And they know how to turn it on for the camera, according to insiders.
The MSNBC couple returned to “Morning Joe” on Tuesday after the network pulled their show for special coverage of Saturday’s shocking assassination attempt on Trump’s life.
Scarborough and Brzezinski — and anchor Willie Geist — addressed the issue at the top of the hour with Scarborough explaining, “We were told, in no uncertain terms, on a Sunday evening that there was going to be one news feed across all NBC news channels yesterday, the ‘Today’ show, Lester Holt… we were going to stay as a network in breaking news mode throughout all day yesterday.”
“That did not happen. We don’t know why that didn’t happen. Our team was not given a good answer as to why that didn’t happen, but it didn’t happen,” a disappointed Scarborough revealed to viewers.
Their revelation left some at the network rolling their eyes.
The overall sentiment across NBC News and MSNBC is that, “Joe and Mika are acting childish and immature. They just need to grow up,” our insider said.
An MSNBC spokesperson said they were not aware of such sentiment about the couple.
“We are proud of the show ‘Morning Joe’ produces every morning,” the rep said. They did not comment on what the hosts said on air about the network.
Scarborough and Brzezinski declined to comment on company gossip via a rep.
Our insider also pointed out that “Morning Joe” producers helped produce two of the pre-empted hours of the four-hour show. “It’s splitting hairs. They knew this was happening. Special coverage continued throughout the day until 4 p.m.,” they said.
Geist — who worked with Savannah Guthrie over the weekend covering the shooting at Trump’s rally — seemed to corroborate part of the couple’s story.
“I was here up on Sunday morning with NBC’s coverage… Savannah and I led the coverage on Sunday… talking to officials about what happened, [and we were] obviously suited up and ready to go for [Monday] morning… and we were told that something else was going to be broadcast,” he said.
Scarborough said they were told there would be special breaking news coverage throughout the day, and “I guess there was such strong blowback about yesterday morning, I guess they changed their plans.”
“We were very surprised. We were very disappointed and, had we known that there wasn’t going to be the one news feed… we obviously would’ve been in yesterday morning,” he added.
Yet another source mused that the lack of clarity around the breaking news programming could have been a misunderstanding — or a deliberate miscommunication — from execs who may have wanted to stay out of Scarborough and Brzezinski’s crosshairs.
“Anyone who knows Joe and Mika would know they wouldn’t agree to it if they knew,” the source said.
Brzezinski chimed in when they returned on Tuesday by explaining the show as, “the place you can go to have the hard conversations in a civil way.” She added, “it seems like now more than ever is a… time that we would like to be on, and I think our viewers agree with that.”
Sources told us late Monday afternoon that “everyone was pissed” that network heads yanked them off air.
They further explained there was a directive to tone down negative commentary on Trump, and to sideline perspective hosts.
A spokesperson denied there was a top down directive for hosts to be soft on Trump, and Trump’s most vocal MSNBC critics — Rachel Maddow, Joy Reid and Nicole Wallace — were at the anchor desk Monday night hosting the network’s special coverage of the Republican National Convention.
“Next time we’re told there’s going to be a newsfeed replacing us, we’ll be in our chairs,” Scarborough concluded.
