Regular “Morning Joe” viewers had to wait a long time on Friday to hear Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski’s take on the sexual misconduct allegations that forced Hollywood mogul Harvey Weinstein to take a leave of absence from The Weinstein Company.
In fact, the MSNBC show skipped any mention of Weinstein — a sometime guest on the show whose company signed a book deal with Brzezinski — until the closing minutes of their final hour.
A search of the TV monitoring service TVeyes revealed no previous mention of the Weinstein story. The same service indicates the headline was also broadly ignored by Morning Joe’s cable news competitors, “New Day” and “Fox & Friends.”
When Mika and Joe did get around it, it was a relatively muted affair — significantly lacking in the fire and fury brought to other topics.
The show also failed to mention that co-host Mika Brzezinski signed a three book deal in a Weinstein Books — Hachette Book Group partnership.
In addition, while the show often invites the journalists behind major scoops to explain their work on-air, there was no sign of either Jodi Kantor or Megan Twohey — the two Times reporters who broke the Weinstein story.
Kantor told The Wrap she had not been invited on the program.
An MSNBC spokesperson declined to comment.
Instead there was show regular and fellow Times journalist Nicholas Confessore, who explained the piece.
“It’s a fascinating story. It says a lot about how power works in the workplace and Hollywood, a place that is supposedly a liberal bastion,” he said. “This man thrived in Hollywood for years and years.”
Donny Deutsch, whose blustering tirades against Donald Trump’s perceived misogyny are well known, was sympathetic to Weinstein, citing excuses found in his own apology.
“One of Harvey’s defenses and it speaks for itself is that he grew up in the ’70s and ’80s and this was behavior status quo, which I’m not going to comment on, but I do think there is a sea change happening,” Deutsch said.
Brzezinski herself stayed mostly silent, only volunteering an artful bit of subject changing at the end of the segment: “I do believe there have been major steps forward in the corporate culture, just a huge setback when it comes to the president.”
Weinstein made a chummy appearance on set in April, 2016 to discuss his support of Hillary Clinton. “Harvey’s here,” said a giggling Brzezinski to welcome his appearance at the time.
On Thursday the media and entertainment worlds were rocked by news that Hollywood titan Harvey Weinstein had settled at least eight cases of sexual harassment over several decades.
The bombshell report from the New York Times made the front page of the Gray Lady’s print edition on Friday.