(Headline USA) MSNBC’s Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski lashed out at their own network on Tuesday after being pulled from the air on Monday, threatening to quit if it happens again.
The couple’s Morning Joe program did not air on Monday after NBC Universal leadership decided to replace it with continued breaking news coverage following the attempted assassination of former President Donald Trump.
Sources within the network said the decision was driven by executives’ worry that the virulently anti-Trump Scarborough and Brzezinski, or one of their guests, would make an inflammatory comment about the attempt on Trump’s life.
MSNBC denied the sources’ allegations in a statement, but Scarborough and Brzezinski had a statement of their own for the network on Tuesday morning when they returned.
“We’ll talk about it on the air, because we talk about everything on the air. We were very surprised. We were very disappointed,” Scarborough told viewers.
Brzezinski agreed, arguing Morning Joe is “the place where you can go to have the hard conversations in a civil way. … And so it seemed like now more than ever, is a day, a time, that we would like to be on.”
Before Brzezinski moved on to the next topic, Scarborough added a threat, “Let me just say: Next time we’re told there’s going to be a news feed replacing us, we will be in our chairs. Yeah. And the news feed will be us, or they can get somebody else to host the show.”
A MSNBC insider familiar with what went down on Monday said Scarborough and Brzezinski aren’t the only ones within the network who are “pissed off.”
Everyone was “shocked,” the insider said. “It was supposed to be one feed like it was this weekend. It was supposed to be one feed with all NBC News platforms. And right now, people that run [the] show are having pretty heated conversations internally about when it went from one feed to two feeds.”
