In Defense of Morning Joe

The popular MSNBC chat show Morning Joe is the subject of a ridiculous new uproar. Last week the show’s co-hosts, Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski, travelled to Mar-a-Lago to meet privately with president-elect Donald Trump. Scarborough and Brzezinski stand accused of hypocrisy because they’ve been very critical of Trump over the years, calling him a dangerous fascist, comparing him to Hitler, and making various other pointed criticisms. Now, their appalled detractors say, they’re bending the knee, normalizing Trump, playing the access game, et cetera. So many disgusted viewers changed channels that viewership was down 12 percent Tuesday.

Look, I hold no brief for Scarborough or Brzezinski. I’ve appeared on Morning Joe once or twice, but not recently, and I don’t pine to be asked back. I don’t watch Morning Joe because my late first wife and I tuned out public affairs television in 1998 amid blanket coverage of President Bill Clinton’s dalliance with Monica Lewinski. Our reasons weren’t partisan, but parental: Watching the news created an unacceptable risk that we’d have to explain what a blow job was to our very young children. Later, I opted against bringing television journalism back into my life because watching video ate too much time. You can’t skim it! To my mind, the World Wide Web rendered TV news obsolete. My cell phone is far superior for breaking news because when there’s new information it pings me and when there isn’t it leaves me alone—it doesn’t fill dead air with blather. Besides, any must-see video will turn up online, often with more thoughtful analysis.

Now that I’ve persuaded you not to watch cable news, allow me to defend two of its best-known practitioners. Scarborough and Brzezinski make their living as political journalists. Political journalism is a job that requires you to talk to creeps. Not every politician is a creep, of course, nor even most. But creeps do get elected or appointed to political office with some frequency, most especially nowadays, and it’s no use pretending they aren’t there. Indeed, creeps often make excellent sources because the same weak impulse control that makes them creeps may cause them to blurt out something newsworthy. Everybody who has ever been a reporter is well aware that the job requires you to spelunk regularly into unsavory caverns. Indeed, interviewing evil people is much more interesting than interviewing saintly ones.

I’m particularly taken aback that people are going on Twitter to condemn Morning Joe for not boycotting Trump. “Such ass kissers,” said Neo Jane. “And this is why I’m done with MSNBC” added Waltb31. “The news organization NEVER cared about American democracy. Only ratings through appeasement.” So tell me this, Neo Jane and Waltb31: If you object so strongly to legitimizing Trump, why are you still loitering in Elon Musk’s MAGA cesspool?

Did Scarborough and Brzezinski grovel at their private meeting? Almost certainly they did; Trump is famous for demanding it. But so what? If you think reporters don’t kiss sources’ asses to acquire access you’re a fool. Noble as it may sound, nobody ever scored an interview by saying, “I plan to confront John Doe about his contemptible lies.” I mentioned my first wife. She was a notoriously lethal writer of political profiles, but, working from home, if she was trying to seduce someone into granting an interview she’d order me out of the room. “I don’t want you judging me for being too good at this,” she’d say. “Get lost.”

We hear much tut-tutting about “access journalism” on social media, as if mere access to powerful people were inherently corrupting. The critics are invariably people who don’t break news. Certainly you can take the access game too far, but only if your endearments pollute your work product. Any interview that doesn’t hold the subject accountable is bad journalism, period. So is a “beat sweetener,” the term of art for a flattering profile intended to elicit future scoops. When a reporter values his sources more highly than his readers, it’s time to hang it up.

But to condemn Scarborough and Brzezinski merely for taking a meeting with Trump jumps the gun. If in the future Morning Joe airs a fawning interview with Trump, or if the hosts butter him up on air, there’ll be ample justification to cry foul. Several critics point out that the pair were guilty of both offenses when Trump ran in 2016. Eric Wemple of The Washington Post recalled much friendly chuckling with Trump that year in cozy Morning Joe interviews. Writing in The Nation, Chris Lehmann points out that after the second presidential debate, which Hillary Clinton plainly won, Brzezinski babbled that Trump “rocked the political world.” Trump even thanked the team on Twitter “for all of your nice words and comments on the debate.” Should Scarborough or Brzezinski revert to such sycophantic nonsense, then they’ll deserve every bit of the scorn they’re receiving now.

But all they did was meet with the guy! That isn’t capitulation; it’s what they get paid to do. In the very unlikely event Trump were to ask me to fly down to Mar-a-Lago, do you honestly think, dear reader, that I’d refuse? My boss would fire me if I did.

Citing two sources, CNN reported this week that Scarborough and Brzezinski visited Mar-a-Lago because they “were credibly concerned that they could face governmental and legal harassment from the incoming Trump administration.” No kidding. Every Trump critic shares that fear—and The Verge’s editor, Nilay Patel, opined in a recent interview that they should take steps now to protect themselves. But I doubt self-protection was Scarborough and Brzezinski’s primary motive, because talking to presidents (and presidents-elect) is their job.

“Uh, you said he was Hitler,” Jon Stewart stated triumphantly on The Daily Show. Perhaps he’s unacquainted with the newspaper columnist Dorothy Thompson (1893-1961). Thompson was a trailblazer in many ways—Katharine Hepburn played a character based on her in the 1942 comedy Woman of the Year—and among these was that she was the first American journalist to interview Adolf Hitler.

The interview took place in December 1931 at the Hotel Kaiserhof opposite the Reich Chancellery in Berlin. Hitler was a year away from becoming chancellor but already leader of a rapidly growing Nazi Party. Thompson didn’t tell Hitler in advance that she’d read Mein Kampf and found it repulsive. Indeed, she agreed to submit her questions in advance, which is never ideal. After she published her interview (in a 1932 book titled I Saw Hitler!) Thompson got kicked out of the country.

History faults Thompson for concluding from her visit that Hitler was too obviously deranged (“the very prototype of the Little Man”) ever to amass serious power. But her access hardly corrupted her; the book did not flinch from expressing utter contempt. “Hitler didn’t have to invent the ingenious idea of appealing to an old racial prejudice,” she wrote. “He found it, in his own mind and soul.”

Hitler turned out to be kind of a lousy interview. This passage may strike a familiar note:

The interview was difficult, because one cannot carry on a conversation with Adolf Hitler. He speaks always, as though he were addressing a mass meeting…. In every question he seeks for a theme that will set him off. Then his eyes focus on some far corner of the room….

Yet as with Trump today, the exercise was worthwhile because the on-deck fuhrer’s boasts warranted serious attention from a complacent world. “I will get into power legally,” Hitler told Thompson. “I will abolish this parliament and the Weimar constitution afterward. I will found an authority-state, from the lowest cell to the highest instance; everywhere there will responsibility and authority above, discipline and obedience below.” Hitler might as well have added, “I am your retribution.”

To be clear, I’m not putting the Morning Joe hosts on a plane with Dorothy Thompson. They’re chat-show hosts, not shoe-leather, globe-trotting correspondents. Nor am I saying, despite drawing some parallels, that Trump is Hitler’s doppelganger. (That role already belongs to Kaiser Wilhelm II.) I’m merely pointing out that if it wasn’t “normalizing” for one American journalist to talk to Adolf Hitler, then it shouldn’t be “normalizing” for two American journalists to talk to Donald Trump. Yes, this monster has been elected president. Yes, that’s terrifying and awful. But please redirect your anger in a more constructive direction. MSNBC is not our problem.