Joe Scarborough addressed his network’s baffling decision to pull the Morning Joe show on Monday, saying that they were told that the network would be running breaking news all morning but that didn’t happen.

Watch:

Joe Scarborough: Before we start this hour, Willie, I just wanted to briefly talk to our friends and viewers that watch us every day. Talk about what happened yesterday. We were told, in so uncertain terms, on Sunday evening that there was going to be one news feed across all NBC news channels yesterday. “Today” show would be Lester Holt. Other people that, well, you worked with on Sunday, that was going to be one news feed across all NBC news channels. That we were going to stay as a network in breaking news mode throughout all day yesterday.

That did not happen. We don’t know why that didn’t happen. Our team was not given a good answer as to why that didn’t happen, but it didn’t happen.

We were also told it was going to happen throughout the day. I guess after there was such a strong blowback about yesterday morning, I guess they changed their plans, and so those plans changed, as well. So it didn’t. You know, we’ve talked about it off the air. We’ll talk about it on the air because we talk about everything on the air.

We were very surprised. We were very disappointed. If we had known that there wasn’t going to be the one news feed from NBC news across all NBC news channels, Willie, we obviously would have been in yesterday morning.

It was reported on Monday that this decision emanated from the top, afraid of any criticism of Donald Trump after a 20-year-old registered Republican tried to assassinate him at a July 13, 2024 rally in Butler, Pennsylvania. Law enforcement responding immediately after the event said Mr. Trump’s ear had been cut by glass from his shattered teleprompter, but no medical information has been released as to the nature of Trump’s injuries. One audience member was killed and two are in critical condition.

Why is the network afraid of criticism of Donald Trump? This is known as self-censoring (something I warned about in 2016), when media and critics respond to the rise of an autocrat with preventive self-censorship. It can be a sign of rising fascism.

The media is doing this for a variety of reasons, none of which have to do with their ostensible job as protectors of democracy or the fourth estate, and most of which have to do with those at the top.

It was shocking yesterday to see a top MSNBC staple pulled on a day when Morning Joe’s take on the situation would have been informative. It should be noted that Joe Scarborough is a former Republican lawmaker and now Independent, while Mika is a moderate Democrat. Certainly, their take belonged on an allegedly liberal network.

The media is using the assassination attempt to deify and inoculate Trump from criticism while fabricating the notion of a consensus that simply does not exist outside of the media echosphere, when in fact he is a large contributing cause of the rise of political violence in the U.S. Trump started his 2016 campaign off with chants of “Lock her up,” said “Second Amendment people” should do something about the then Democratic nominee, and has mocked Paul and Nancy Pelosi after Paul was critically attacked and required a lot more medical intervention, including surgery on his brain, than Donald Trump faced.

A Reuters special report from August of 2023 found:

“Incidents of political violence began rising in 2016, around the time of Trump’s first run for the presidency, said Gary LaFree, a University of Maryland criminologist who has tracked such violence in a terrorism database between 1970 and 2020.

…

In contrast (to earlier decades), much of today’s political violence is aimed at people – and most of the deadly outbursts tracked by Reuters have come from the right. Of the 14 fatal political attacks since the Capitol riot in which the perpetrator or suspect had a clear partisan leaning, 13 were right-wing assailants. One was on the left.”

Does anyone recall the media silencing criticism of the then Speaker in the days following that horrific attack or getting teary-eyed at Pelosi’s calm and measured responses – a stark contrast to the Trump surrogates and now Vice Presidential candidate nominee blaming Democrats for an attack by a registered Republican?