Is America eager for a bit of political detox? Maybe, maybe not, but MSNBC’s Morning Joe host Joe Scarborough thinks there could be interest in some escapism. The veteran morning host is ramping up his longform interviews with cultural figures like musicians, actors and directors, betting that there’s an eager audience. And he’s hoping that they also click on YouTube, where Morning Joe garnered some 338 million views last year, up nearly 30 percent from the year prior.
Of course, MSNBC is itself going through major changes. The company got new leadership following the exit of president Rashida Jones and elevation of Rebecca Kutler, and the cable channel will be spun out from Comcast into a new venture (“SpinCo,” for now) later this year. And Scarborough himself took some flak from viewers after he and Mike Brzezinski disclosed that they met with President Trump at Mar-a-Lago after the election, though MSNBC leadership was aware of and approved of the decision.
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In a conversation with The Hollywood Reporter, Scarborough addresses what’s next for MSNBC and Morning Joe (including an interactive town hall idea he had), and why he is pushing to bring more artists and actors to the table in the morning.
Let’s start with the Mar-a-Lago thing [the decision to meet with President Trump at his West Palm Beach club, which sparked a backlash from MSNBC fans on social media]. I know you addressed the decision and why you did it on-air, but were you surprised by the reaction to it?
I was, but there were two different reactions. There was the social media reaction. There was the reaction on X and Threads and BlueSky. And then there was a reaction from every publisher and editor and reporter and news director that I spoke to, and all of them were like, “of course you went there.”
I’ve talked to reporters from The New York Times, The Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, Financial Times that have all talked to him, they all talk to [Trump chief of staff] Susie Wiles. The only difference is we were transparent about it, and we told our audience that we had done it.
So I am surprised, but everybody that we knew, everybody that we respected, everybody in the business, was like “what’s the big fuss about?” Social media is just a different landscape, but that was all sound and fury signifying nothing.
It does feel connected to the larger changes that we’re seeing in terms of how people interact with social media, and the relationship that I’m sure you have with your audience. Related to that, MSNBC is going through changes. You have new leadership, [former MSNBC president] Rashida Jones left, and Rebecca Kutler has kind of stepped in [as interim president], and the company is going to be spun out by Comcast into a new startup. How are you thinking about the changes that MSNBC is going through and is going to have?
I have been positive about this from the very beginning. [CNBC Squawk Box anchor] Andrew Ross Sorkin and I have talked a good bit about it. Just on the financial side of things, from the very beginning, we both thought it’s a pretty good thing that we’re now going to be part of a company that’s going to reinvest in TV, and in our network and CNBC and other others, whereas [with Comcast] there was so much outside pressure from Wall Street.
If Comcast made hundreds of millions of dollars off of CNBC or MSNBC, the pressure would be not to reinvest it into us, but instead to build more fiber cable in Bismarck or something like that. So SpinCo, I love that. It’s self-contained, and it’s in the business of cable networks. That’s the first part.
The second part is — which I found after talking to [incoming SpinCo CEO] Mark Lazarus and Rebecca Kutler — Mika and I were talking to Mark, and I was like, “who do we report to? What is the management structure?” And he goes, “here’s your management structure: Alex [Morning Joe executive producer Alex Korson], Rebecca, me. That’s it.” He said we’re streamlining this. We’re going to make this as entrepreneurial as possible.
We all love NBC and we all love NBC News and we all love NBC Sports. But when you’re in General Electric or Comcast, there’s layer after layer after layer. What Mark is so excited about, and what Rebecca is so excited about, and what I’m now really excited about is how entrepreneurial they’re going to be.
[One idea that Scarborough developed and will bring to the show is a “town hall” interactive concept] I had this idea: Morning Joe town hall meetings, where, after the show, we set up a town hall meeting. People that get our newsletter could call in, maybe I have [Washington Post columnist] David Ignatius or somebody else there, and people could talk to me, could ask David Ignatius questions, and we build out the community, let the community have a back and forth.
These sort of ideas die in most corporate structures. So I get off the set in Washington D.C., and I walk into our break room, and there’s Rebecca [visiting before her promotion] and she said, “I heard your idea. I think it’s fantastic, here are the three weeks we can do it.”
And there are other things that we’ve always talked about doing. I want to update the newsletter. I want to make the podcast more personalized. So there are all these ideas that we have, and Rebecca is all-in on it, and she said, we want you to be entrepreneurial. We want you to be big. We want you to take chances.
I know that you’ve been trying to do more long-form interviews and conversations with cultural figures in addition to the political figures that you have. You’ve done them over the years, but it does seem like you’re ramping that up a little bit. Why lean into the cultural side of things?
We had done a lot of that in the past. In the pre-Trump days, I’d say pre-2015, it would be very normal for us to have Steven Spielberg, Ron Howard, Bradley Cooper, Pete Townsend, all of these pop culture figures on the show. And then when Donald Trump was running and got elected, he consumed most of the bandwidth of not only the show, but also news in general.
For years, I have wanted us to push back and go more into the original concept of Morning Joe, which was like, yes, politics and foreign policy and the economy, but also music and film and Broadway.
We’ve wanted to do it. And in 2022 everything was just so hot. I knew that if I wanted to actually interview artists and actors and directors, people that I’ve always loved, whether it’s Christopher Nolan or Al Pacino, that I needed to create a different space for it. So we originally created a primetime show where we would do it [Joe Scarborough Presents], and we would interview these people and pop culture figures and influential artists. But then after a while, I said, wait, this stuff is so good. I don’t want to have Christopher Nolan on at eight o’clock at night. I want my Morning Joe family to be able to hear Christopher Nolan and Robert Downey, Jr, and all the Oppenheimer people. I wanted that in the morning. So we moved it back to the morning, and we’ve just focused on it a lot more.
Do you think there’s perhaps some demand from the audience for stuff that is a bit escapist and maybe a little break from the day-to-day politics? The velocity of news these days is insane.
I think so. But I really wouldn’t call it escapism so much as I would call it a return to reality. I think the hyper focus on politics, the hyper focus on partisanship, the hyper focus on everything that Donald Trump does, the hyper focus on everything that opponents of Donald Trump do, and filling that out for four hours must be exhausting to people that are watching.
It’s kind of like when I got [soccer journalist and Men In Blazers founder] Roger Bennett to start coming on in 2007-2008 to talk about soccer every Monday morning. I remember Tom Brokaw asking, “What? What are you talking about soccer on a news show for?” It was because I like soccer! I like the Premier League, and it caught on. I definitely know there’s a big appetite for it. I mean, who doesn’t want to hear Al Pacino talk about his life and his work? Who doesn’t want to hear Christopher Nolan talking about his creative process, or Matt Damon and Emily Blunt and Cillian Murphy, all of them talking about what it was like making Oppenheimer? I think there’s a big appetite for that.
A lot of these segments do particularly well on YouTube. One of the nice things there is that the people watching on YouTube may not be the same people that are watching on TV. It’s just a different audience. It’s a much younger audience. Why do you think it is that some of these conversations are clicking on that platform?
It’s great. One of the things that I had been worried about, that Mika and I always went back and forth on, was the fear that we were just preaching to the choir. Whether you’re talking about YouTube, whether you’re talking about the newsletter, whether you’re talking about writing in other formats, whether you’re talking about these town hall meetings, all of them open up the audience and help you reach new people and get new insights.
I will tell you that since such a large swath of social media has gotten so toxic, I actually found myself going onto YouTube more, and it’s just an extraordinary format, where if I randomly want to see a Paul McCartney concert from 1976 I can type it in and sit there and it comes up immediately. Or if I want to see a [Winston] Churchill speech, I can do the same. I haven’t followed it closely, but I read about Piers Morgan apparently doing extraordinarily well on YouTube, and I suspect others will probably follow in that direction.
That format, the longform interview, is doing really well on YouTube, but also in general, in podcasts. I think Piers’ show is kind of a hybrid between a podcast and a cable news show. But when you see Mark Zuckerberg sitting for three hours with Joe Rogan, or Call Her Daddy, it does feel like that format — whether you’re listening to it as a podcast or watching it on YouTube — there’s demand.
When Morning Joe started in 2007, 18 years ago, we were coming into an age where Lindsay Lohan and Paris Hilton were taking up a lot of space on cable news networks. And what everybody kept saying back then was the news hole is shrinking. The news hole is shrinking not just on cable news, but also on the evening newscasts on the broadcast networks. And the whole premise of Morning Joe was to blow that out of the water and have somebody on to talk for 30 minutes about a book they read.
I remember in 2007 I was walking through the Atlanta airport, and I saw Walter Isaacson’s biography on Einstein, and I said, “I should pick that up. I love Walter’s writing, and this will be fascinating.” So I read it, and then I told our producers that I wanted Walter Isaacson on the show to talk about Einstein. They call me back and say, “Walter doesn’t wake up early. He’s not going to come in.” I said, “tell him to call us from bed” and they were “no, no, we can’t do that.” I go “tell Walter he can do the interview while he’s lying in bed.”
So I talked to Walter [who was in bed], and we took the segment 15 minutes, and I was fascinated. And the producer at the time was saying, “go to break, go to break, this is killing us, this is killing us.” I said, “Walter, if you could, can you stick around for another block?” And we had Walter on for another 15 minutes talking about his book on Einstein, and it ended up being the highest rated segment of our first year on the air.
The fact that that people want longform interviews, I think a lot of that is a reaction to social media, 144 characters, algorithms that pit people against each other and again, lot of sound and fury signifying nothing. So I love the three-hour interviews, and I love the conversations wherever they’re being held.
I know that you’re in conversation to have [rock legend] Mick Jagger, [actress and director] Anjelica Huston, and [London mayor] Sadiq Khan on. Are there other guests that you’d like to have and that but haven’t had a chance to do yet?
Paul McCartney. I want to interview Paul McCartney. That’s the only person. Here I am, 18 years later, still reaching for the brass ring. One of these days, one of these days, one fine day.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
