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“Morning Joe” took a hit to its viewership Monday after hosts Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski revealed that they had met with President-elect Donald Trump. The revelation was met with decidedly mixed reactions online, and in real time, over 100,000 viewers turned the channel before 8 a.m.
After starting off with 839,000 total viewers in the 6 a.m. to 7 a.m. hour on Monday morning, total viewership for “Morning Joe” dropped to 694,000 in the 7 a.m. to 8 a.m. time slot following the hosts’ explanation of their meeting, according to Nielsen live-plus-same-day figures. The 17% drop off in viewership is pretty unusual from the 6 a.m. to 7 a.m., with viewership typically growing as bigger audiences tune in for their morning news.
Still, viewership grew in the final two hours of the broadcast compared to the 7 a.m. to 8 a.m. hour, with the 8 a.m. to 9 a.m. hour growing its audience to 775,000 viewers and most of that audience sticking around for the 9 a.m. to 1o a.m. hour, which brought in 770,000 viewers. From the first hour of the broadcast, “Morning Joe” saw a 8% audience decline into the last hour of the broadcast.
A similar trend can be seen in “Morning Joe” ratings in the key cable demo among adults 25-54, with the 6 a.m. to 7 a.m. hour bringing in 113,000 viewers in the demo before declining 38% to reach just 70,000 viewers in the demo for the 7 a.m. to 8 a.m. hour.
Ratings grew at 8 a.m. to reach 83,000 viewers in the demo for the next hour, before dropping slightly to 79,000 viewers in the demo for the 9 a.m. to 10 a.m. hour. That marks a 30% downtick in ratings from the broadcast’s first hour until its final hour.
“Morning Joe” continued to see a ratings decline on Tuesday, when the program averaged 680,000 total viewers — down 11.7% from Monday’s viewership of 770,00 — and scored a demo viewership of 76,o00 — down 11.6% from Monday’s demo viewership of 86,000.
Tuesday’s broadcast of “Morning Joe” was the show’s third lowest broadcast of 2024, with its total viewership down 38% from its average 2024 viewership to date while ratings slid 37% from the show’s average viewership for the demo.
The meeting between the MSNBC hosts and Trump aimed to “restart communications,” Brzezinski said on the Monday morning broadcast, adding “Joe and I realized it’s time to do something different and that starts with not only talking about Donald Trump but also talking with him.” The news was not received fondly by many viewers, and CNN reported Tuesday the hosts met with the president-elect because they were “credibly concerned that they could face governmental and legal harassment.”
