| On Monday morning, I woke up around dawn and tried to gingerly make my way down to the kitchen without waking anyone up to get a handle on the day. After devouring a quick coffee while reading on my phone—the usual stuff: Mike Allen, Playbook, DealBook, Bloomberg, The Daily Upside, WWD, THR, a quick scan of the Times and Journal apps, etcetera—I slipped out to the garage, hopped on the Peloton Tread, and turned on Morning Joe.
Back when it started, during the early days of the Obama-Clinton race and then Obama-McCain campaign, Morning Joe was both a media revelation and a surprise success story. Joe Scarborough was a former congressman turned journeyman broadcaster who had carefully angled for MSNBC’s three hours of open air time after Imus was defenestrated. Mika Brzezinski was a career news pro famous mainly for her last name. Her father, Zbigniew, had served as Jimmy Carter’s national security advisor and was a towering figure in Washington. Willie Geist, for his part, was a well-mannered nepo baby of sorts, hailing from the erudite Times and Ridgewood intelligentsia. He was the son of Bill Geist, the renowned columnist and CBS news veteran. Few had high expectations for the broadcast.
And yet, Morning Joe quickly proved to be a true reflection of its time. Much like Seinfeld was conceived by Larry David to be a show about nothing, Morning Joe was designed by Scarborough and MSNBC president Phil Griffin to defy the rules of conventional cable television. Its premise was deceptively simple: Scarborough and his co-hosts would invite on well-sourced journalists, politicos, and scenesters and just, well, talk politics like real lobbyists, electeds, and hacks talked politics—first names only, shorthand, polite interruption, second-guessing, hypothesizing, and so forth. It was a telegenic, and not even that telegenic, version of a conversation you might imagine overhearing at Cafe Milano, all focused on saying the quiet part out loud.
Scarborough’s political street cred was also an early harbinger of a new kind of media host. He wasn’t a well-manicured Brian Williams type who had worked his way up the local news and hair and makeup ladder. Instead, he was a political addict whose appetite and credibility provided a natural patois for the medium—and, in this way, he was a paradigm for Pat McAfee, Scott Galloway, the All In guys, and other domain experts who have metamorphosed into media stars.
Happy to fulfill the Scarborough-Griffin edict, the Morning Joe regulars spoke extemporaneously and insightfully about the historic presidential race that we were all living through in real time. It was a welcome departure from the poorly aging tropes of traditional cable—the overly scripted roundtables or McLaughlin Report-esque faux intellectual duels. Obama won the election, of course, but the cycle belonged to Morning Joe.
In those early years, I watched the show religiously. In the intervening years, less so, even as Joe and Mika eventually took over a fourth hour, extending the show’s runtime from 6 a.m. to 10 a.m., an extraordinary network footprint. But I’ve once again become transfixed by the program ever since this presidential race elevated to a new octave, and particularly since Biden’s performance at the Atlanta debate. Usually I tune in during my morning run.
I was particularly eager to watch this particular Monday morning to understand the gang’s assessment of the horrific attempt on Donald Trump’s life some 36 hours earlier in Butler, Pennsylvania. I’d been working the phones the day before and the conventional political wisdom suggested that Trump’s martyrdom would widen his mushrooming lead over Biden, and the whole tragic affair was likely to delay the Democratic establishment’s increasingly unsubtle attempt to convince the president to drop out of the race. I was curious to see if that perspective held or shifted.
But when I turned on the television, I was confronted with NBC News Now, the network’s lower-octane streaming service. It seemed unimaginable that MSNBC would pull their biggest show—the entirety of their morning lineup, really—on the fraught news day during a historic election season. I quickly flipped over to CNN, frequently checking back to find, to my great surprise, that NBC News C.E.O. Cesar Conde and MSNBC president Rashida Jones had indeed pulled the plug.
Later that day, I came upon a link to a story suggesting that the news division leaders had made this decision in concert with Joe and Mika in order to ensure that none of the show’s guests offered an inadvertent or inflammatory comment that would ignite some sort of political-media maelstrom on the first day of the Republican National Convention in Milwaukee. But that posture seemed implausible to me, or at least only half right. So I sent a text to my partner Dylan Byers asking him to figure out what had really happened.
By the afternoon, Dylan was already texting me in the office with updates. And a few days later, he delivered a fascinating, nuanced, and sophisticated piece, Morning Joe in America, about what really went down that Monday. The piece also exhumed a number of other leitmotifs of the modern MSNBC experience, where numerous on-air talent are struggling to offer their perspective on Biden’s electability despite the whims and desires of their steadfastly liberal audience, which doesn’t want to hear it. Meanwhile, perhaps more so than at any time since the Obama-McCain race, the show had become the real theater for live political discourse: Biden had called in to buttress his support, much to Mika and Joe’s palpable delight, and Pelosi phoned in days later to extinguish the good vibes. It all reaffirmed a cardinal belief here at Puck, and one that has surfaced continuously during this endless campaign: that the race has become a media story as much as a political one. And that made it all the more complex for Conde and Jones to manage from their corner offices.
Morning Joe in America is one of those brilliant Puck stories that illustrate how all the power corridors of our society converge at the very top. For those hungering for more decisively political tales explaining this bizarre quagmire, however, I’d turn your attention to a number of other Puck gems from the week. Tara Palmeri’s perspicacious piece Fall of the Biden Bunker penetrates the president’s shrinking inner circle and reveals its battle lines. Julia Ioffe’s brilliant Biden Group Therapy brings readers into the mourning circles of top Democrats as his electoral hopes collapse. It’s an agony that’s perhaps best captured in John Heilemann’s piece, Trump’s 25 Paths to 270.
Clearly, this race is far from over. In fact, it seems like it might only now, after more than a year, be about to commence. These next four months promise to be an extraordinary choreography of political engineering, advocacy, fundraising, and Faustian bargains. I say this every week, but it’s never been more true: This is the true story of our time, and precisely what you should expect from Puck.
Have a great weekend,
Jon |
