On Tuesday, “Morning Joe” co-host Mika Brzezinski reacted to her MSNBC colleague Chris Matthews’ abrupt retirement announcement from “Hardball” on-air Monday night, where he apologized for inappropriate comments he made in the past. She decried “cancel culture” while her co-host Joe Scarborough described Matthews as “a man without guile” who “didn’t measure his words.”
“You know what Chris believed and why he believed it,” Scarborough said in tribute to Matthews, who was identified Friday by reporter Laura Bassett as the once-unnamed “famous broadcast journalist” she had accused in a 2017 piece of making inappropriate comments to her when she was a guest on his show.
Scarborough called him “a beloved figure” and “all too human,” as Brzezinski moved on to criticize the “cancel culture” that she felt led to his departure from their network.
“It’s not even 12 hours after his resignation so I’m sort of still processing what has happened, reading a lot, but I’m sad,” she said. “Chris’ passion and joy was infectious as we’ve all said and it was backed up by a political gut that was unmatched in our world and you can’t imitate that. You can’t replace that. You can’t replace that and he shared that with us every night. As a woman I want to say this: I loved working with Chris Matthews. I really enjoyed being his colleague.”
She went on, “I understand the important changes around this so-called ‘cancel culture.’ They’re important. They’re hard. They’re painful. And in many cases, they are necessary. I do wonder, at this point, though, as we move forward and we look at this and what happened here, if there might be a better way for all of us in the future where we work through this and get to a better place.”
She went on to say she’ll miss his show.