Morning Joe suffers rankings nosedive after hosts met Trump at Mar-a-Lago | EUROtoday

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Morning Joe rankings have taken a nose-dive as hosts Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski face a backlash for assembly with Donald Trump.

During Monday’s present, the hosts revealed that they’d traveled to Mar-a-Lago on Friday to “restart communications” with the president-elect earlier than he takes workplace, marking their first face-to-face assembly in seven years.

Scarborough and Brzezinski have been extremely essential of Trump, and so their shock announcement was met with criticism from fellow MSNBC colleagues, media pundits and political figures.

Now, new knowledge from Nielsen reveals that it might have additionally harm the present’s rankings.

Morning Joe airs for 4 hours every morning between 6 a.m. and 10 a.m. The cable information present is usually mentioned to garner viewers hour over hour, in response to Mediate.

Nielsen knowledge reveals that 56 minutes after the hosts started explaining their journey to the Trump residence, viewing figures started to tumble.

Between 7 a.m. and eight a.m., they’d fallen 17 p.c from 839,000 to 694,000. Among the 25- to 54-year-old age group, viewing figures plummeted by 38 p.c.

During the 8 a.m. to 9 a.m. hour, the present briefly bounced again with 775,000 viewers however, from 9 a.m. to 10 a.m., the numbers dropped barely once more to 770,000.

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The program’s X channel has additionally turned off all its feedback, though it’s not clear whether or not that is associated to the announcement of the assembly.

The hosts have been dealing with backlash with Jon Stewart of The Daily Show calling them out for assembly Trump after not too long ago evaluating him to Adolf Hitler.

Trump’s former presidential rival Nikki Haley additionally described it as a stunt to bolster MSNBC’s rankings, including that “they realized they needed Trump for their survival”.

MSNBC host Katie Phang made a extra oblique jibe at Scarborough and Brzezinski. “Normalizing Trump is a bad idea,” she wrote on X. “Period.”

During Monday morning’s present, Brzezinski defined her rationale behind the assembly.

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“For those asking why we would go speak to the president-elect during such fraught times, especially between us, I guess I would ask back, why wouldn’t we?” she mentioned.

The husband and spouse duo mentioned they spoke to Trump about “abortion, mass deportation, threats of… retribution against political opponents and media outlets”.

Scarborough chimed in that “we didn’t see eye-to-eye on a lot of issues, and we told him so.”

Trump, nonetheless, informed Fox News that the trade was “extremely cordial.”

“In many ways, it’s too bad that it wasn’t done long ago,” Trump mentioned, including that it’s “very important, if not vital, to have a free, fair and open media or press.”