Morning Joe suffers ratings nosedive after hosts met Trump at Mar-a-Lago

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

During Monday’s show, the hosts revealed that they had traveled to Mar-a-Lago on Friday to “restart communications” with the president-elect before he takes office, marking their first face-to-face meeting in seven years.

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

Data from Nielsen suggested that it may have also hurt the show’s ratings.

Morning Joe airs for four hours each morning between 6 a.m. and 10 a.m. The cable news show is typically said to garner viewers hour over hour, according to Mediate.

Nielsen data shows that 56 minutes after the hosts began explaining their trip to the Trump residence, viewing figures began to tumble.

Between 7 a.m. and 8 a.m., they had fallen 17 percent from 839,000 to 694,000. Among the 25- to 54-year-old age group, viewing figures plummeted by 38 percent.

During the 8 a.m. to 9 a.m. hour, the show briefly bounced back with 775,000 viewers but, from 9 a.m. to 10 a.m., the numbers dropped slightly again to 770,000.

However, that hour-to-hour dropoff, according to additional information from Nielsen, was based on the “live plus same day” ratings — which track both live viewership and those who watch the program later via DVR. The Nov. 18 telecast had an unusually high number of “time-shifted” viewers who watched via recording the hour that the Morning Joe hosts announced the Mar-a-Lago visit. While 426,000 viewers tuned in live to watch the 6 a.m. hour, another 413,000 checked it out later in the day on DVR. The DVR audience for the first hour was 77 percent higher than the week before. Subsequent hours for that broadcast saw much smaller “time-shifted” viewership numbers.

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The program’s X channel turned off all its comments, although it is not clear whether this is related to the announcement of the meeting.

The hosts have been facing backlash with Jon Stewart of The Daily Show calling them out for meeting Trump after recently comparing him to Adolf Hitler.

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

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

During Monday morning’s show, Brzezinski explained her rationale behind the meeting.

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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 said.

The husband and wife duo said 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, however, told Fox News that the exchange was “extremely cordial.”

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

Editor’s Note: This story was updated on Dec. 3 to include additional ratings information from Nielsen.