CNN boss Jeff Zucker told Joe Scarborough to start getting his resume ready after MSNBC’s misguided Republican-centric Beltway chatfest has fallen to fourth place in the cable news morning show ratings.
According to TVNewser:
Zucker’s signature program, the morning show New Day, which turns 2 on June 17, is riding that ratings uptick. The program has bested MSNBC’s Morning Joe for 11 consecutive months in the news demo and posted a 50 percent gain in May, while Morning Joe has placed fourth in the demo since last summer.
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Morning Joe has bested New Day among total viewers for the last three months and still beats CNN in the demo in New York and Washington, D.C. — “barely,” Zucker adds — prompting host Joe Scarborough to defend his show on Twitter as the one preferred by “influencers.” Retorts Zucker: “That’s not how the game is played; that’s not how [TV] is sold. And if that’s what you’re talking about, it’s probably about time to start getting your résumé ready.”
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Beyond the competitive jab, Zucker has a point. Scarborough’s ratings are in the dumpster, and they aren’t getting better. The network brass at MSNBC loves Scarborough and Morning Joe but viewers don’t. It turns out viewers don’t want to watch a program on a network that sold itself to viewers as progressive that is filled with Beltway conventional wisdom and Republican talking points.
For all of Scarborough’s packaging of himself as the “average guy,” Morning Joe is pretty darn insular and elitist. Joe Scarborough has been delusionally defending his ratings for months, but the reality is that the show is in decline. Some might blame the MSNBC’s ratings plunge for this development, but Morning Joe doesn’t have a poor lead in to blame like Rachel Maddow does in primetime.
Scarborough is supposed to set the stage for MSNBC’s morning programming, and he has done a horrible job. Any competent network would look at Morning Joe and see that something needs to change, so it’s lucky for Joe that people running MSNBC aren’t competent and think that everything is fine.
Jeff Zucker was right. Scarborough should be unemployed.
Jason is the managing editor. He is also a White House Press Pool and a Congressional correspondent for PoliticusUSA. Jason has a Bachelor’s Degree in Political Science. His graduate work focused on public policy, with a specialization in social reform movements.
Awards and Professional Memberships
Member of the Society of Professional Journalists and The American Political Science Association
