By Carter B. Horsley
"Morning Joe" airs on MSNBC in New York from 6 A. M. to 9 P.M. weekdays and is hosted by Joe Scarborough, a good-looking, former conservative Republican Congressman from Florida, and Mika Brzezinski, the very winsome and liberal daughter of Zbigniew Brzezinski, the National Security Advisor in the Carter Administration.
"Morning Joe" does give an anchor on the Weather Channel a few minutes every hour for a national climate overview, and the "junior" co-host, Willie Geist, whose father used to be a reporter for The New York Times, chimes in from time to time with some sports news or "gossip." He is so good at it that MSNBC early in 2010 gave him his own half-hour program that is now the lead-in to "Morning Joe." The premise of that program is "what in heaven's name are you doing up at this hour?"
To assume, wrongly, that this is all good-natured fun and a pleasant way to chug your morning coffee, would be a big mistake.
Although the program only has about 400,000 viewers as of mid-2010, it is the show on television so Katie Couric and Diane Sawyer better start packing their bags.
It's that their regular guests are a news-junkie's dream team: Joe Meachem, the editor of Newsweek; Rick Stengel, the editor of Time; Patrick Buchanan, the conservator commentator; Erin Burnett, the outrageous cute but very bright and charming early morning female star of CNBC; Eugene Robinson, the savvy and incisive columnist for The Washington Post; Chuck Todd, the astute Washington correspondent for CNBC; Andrew Ross Sorkin, a financial news reporter for The New York Times; Ariana Huffington, the head of The Huffinton Post; and Tina Brown, the editor of The Daily Beast.
On any given weekday, most of these personalities will appear on the program as well as a good sprinkling of leading figures in that's day's political news.
Another regular guest is Mike Barnicle, former columnist for the New York Daily News and the Boston Globe and currently for the Boston Herald, who is astoundingly well versed not only in politics but virtually anything to which common sense can be applied. Indeed, his avuncular wisdom is generally the most interesting and sober even though he looks like he's the drinking buddy of all the politicians in Boston.
That quality, indeed, is part of the show's magic. One senses that one has been admitted to some inner sanctum where all secrets of the world can be overheard and fortunately not all at the same time although Mika could probably be encouraged to snap her proverbial whip a bit more often.
It is also interesting that another regular commentator, Tom Brokaw, can often be viewed intently listening to the rest of the panel before delivering his usually very perceptive remarks.
Teleprompting is frowned upon.
An article by Liesl Schillinger in the May 7, 2010 edition of The New York Times, observed that "With the attention deficit disorder of the last decade, as channels have multiplied, neurotic networks have dumbed down their morning mainstays in an attempt to retain distractable viewers, cramming the programs with cooking segments, scripted happy talk, interviews with grinning tourists and endless puffy promotional appearances with celebrities - plugging new movies, diets, beauty books and so on. A sprinkling of hard news is thrown in to sop up some of the sugar. This is not the recipe of “Morning Joe.”
Thank goodness!