Guilty pleasures
By NewsPress Now
‘Morning Joe’ hosts say they met with Trump to reopen lines of communication
MSNBC hosts Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski, fierce critics of President-Elect Donald Trump, say they traveled to Mar-a-Lago for a meeting with him to reopen lines of communication that would better serve their morning show viewers.
With feelings still raw two weeks after the election, their journey hasn’t gone over that well with many fans and critics of “Morning Joe.”
The show’s anchor team had been so critical of Trump that, in September, Scarborough said that “it’s not a reach” to compare him to Hitler. MSNBC pulled “Morning Joe” from the air the Monday after the assassination attempt on Trump this past summer.
On Monday’s show, the hosts said they had reached out to Trump last Thursday and met with him the next day in Florida. “It was the first time we have seen him in seven years,” Brzezinski said.
She said Trump was “cheerful, upbeat,” even as the three of them discussed issues they disagreed on.
“What we did agree on was to restart communications,” she said. Her father, the late Zbigniew Brzezinski, the national security adviser in Jimmy Carter’s administration, often spoke with world leaders he disagreed with, and she said that’s a job for journalists and commentators too.
“For those asking why we would speak to the president-elect during such fraught times, especially between us, I guess I would ask back, ‘Why wouldn’t we?’” Brzezinski said.
Trump confirmed the meeting in an interview with FOX News Digital. “I very much appreciated the fact that they wanted to have open communication,” he said. “In many ways, it’s too bad that it wasn’t done long ago.”
Not everyone reacted the same way. On “The View” Monday, co-host Sunny Hostin said the country needs a free press willing to speak truth to power and she didn’t think it was necessary to travel to Florida to “kiss the ring.”
Jeff Jarvis, author of the BuzzMachine blog and a retired journalism professor at the City University of New York, said online that “it is a disgusting show of obeisance in advance.”
Several conservative commentators weren’t impressed either. Talk show host Buck Sexton, in a post on X, called the meeting astounding. “Trump’s victory is so complete, ‘Morning Joe’ has fully surrendered,” Sexton wrote. Veteran cable news personality Greta Van Susteren called it “groveling.”
“Morning Joe,” like many shows on MSNBC, has seen its ratings drop precipitously since the election as its liberal audience takes a break. It’s a post-election pattern similar to that experience in past years with viewers who supported the losing party. After a break, many usually return.
Neither host was available to speak to a reporter after the show, a network spokesman said. Scarborough seemed to anticipate criticism when talking about the decision to meet with Trump.
“Don’t be mistaken,” he said. “We’re not here to defend or normalize Donald Trump. We’re here to report on him and hopefully provide you with insights.”
In the same Fox News interview, Trump said that he had an obligation to the American public to be open and available to the press. “If not treated fairly, however, that will end,” he said.
The Associated Press says buyouts and some layoffs are ahead
The Associated Press said Monday that it would begin offering buyouts and lay off selected employees, part of a plan to reduce the news outlet’s staff by about 8% and accelerate a transition to a digital-first organization.
The move is part of what is expected to be a dispiriting end-of-year period in the news industry, which is beset by business woes that go back years. The end of a busy presidential-election cycle was also expected to accelerate reorganization plans.
The AP said those eligible for buyouts were to learn of the offer, which would include severance pay and partial health coverage for 18 months, by the end of Monday. Those whose positions are due to be eliminated would learn about their fates over the next few weeks.
Once considered the world’s largest newsgathering organization, the AP no longer makes that claim and does not reveal the size of its staff. As a result, it was impossible to say on Monday how many people would be affected. The AP said less than half of the anticipated cuts would involve its news employees, with the bulk happening within the United States.
The News Media Guild said that 121 of its members would be offered buyouts. The AP, without giving an estimate, said there would be fewer job cuts than that among the union members.
For years, news executives have had to make cutbacks because solutions to their business problems have proven elusive, said Gabriel Kahn, who helps run the media, economics and entrepreneurship program at the USC Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism. It has become even tougher in the past couple of years as the work of journalists has become much less visible on social media, due to changes in search algorithms and artificial intelligence, he said.
“They’ve pulled the plug out of the bathtub and we’re watching the water going down the drain,” Kahn said.
The AP, which prides itself on being an unbiased news source, offers news stories, pictures, video, audio and interactive content direct to consumers via the website apnews.com. But the bulk of its business comes from selling its journalism to other news organizations that use it.
Earlier this year, two major news chains, Gannett and McClatchy, said they would stop buying news from AP, in Gannett’s case ending a relationship that had lasted more than a century. The AP has diversified its revenue stream in recent years, including accepting philanthropic funding, but is still hurt by the news industry’s overall woes.
“We all know this is a time of transformation in the media sector,” Daisy Veerasingham, AP’s president and CEO, said in a note to staff members sent early Monday morning. “Our customers — both who they are and what they need from us — are changing rapidly. This is why we’ve focused on delivering a digital-first news report. We now need to accelerate on this path.”
In broad strokes, that means an increased emphasis on visual journalism — photos and video and the digital content that incorporates them into storytelling.
Veerasingham was not available for an interview, an AP spokeswoman said.
AP remains a central part of the news industry’s ecosystem, particularly when it comes to U.S. elections. During its election coverage earlier this month, the AP had unprecedented usage of its live video, election data, visuals and interactive products, Veerasingham said.
The AP said it had reached a tentative deal with its union to offer the buyouts, but that is subject to ratification by its members. The head of AP’s union did not immediately return a message seeking comment on Monday.
WWE’s “Monday Night Raw” on Netflix will debut on Jan. 6 in Los Angeles
LOS ANGELES | World Wrestling Entertainment’s first episode of “Monday Night Raw” on Netflix will take place from the Intuit Dome on Jan. 6.
WWE Chief Content Officer Paul “Triple H” Levesque made the announcement Sunday night when he appeared on stage during Travis Scott’s concert at ComplexCon in Las Vegas.
Netflix will carry “Raw” in the U.S., Canada, the United Kingdom and Latin America beginning in January, with additional countries to be added over time as contracts expire. The bigger component, though, is that Netflix will carry all of the company’s shows overseas, including its premium live events like WrestleMania, SummerSlam and Royal Rumble.
Scott’s new music will also serve as the theme song for “Monday Night Raw.”
The announcement of WWE’s debut of Netflix comes after what has been a stressful weekend for the streaming company. Many viewers took to Twitter/X and Bluesky to express their frustrations with streaming and buffering problems before and during the fight between Jake Paul and Mike Tyson.
According to the website Down Detector, nearly 85,000 viewers logged problems with outages or streaming leading up to the fight.
Netflix said Saturday that the bout was watched by a worldwide audience of 60 million and peaked at 65 million concurrent streams. It said nearly 50 million households were tuned in for the co-main event between Katie Taylor and Amanda Serrano in which Taylor kept her undisputed super lightweight championship with another disputed decision. Netflix said it would provide additional viewership information, including total viewers, this week.
Netflix will also broadcast two NFL games on Christmas Day.
—From AP reports
