http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/09/fashion/09JoeMika.html?partner=rss&emc=rss<snip>
This is not the recipe of “Morning Joe.” The banter of Mika, 43, and Joe, 47 (no one ever seems to use their last names) is off the cuff and unrehearsed. So much so that when Mika invited on the editor of Self magazine last month to discuss a new self-help book, “The Nine Rooms of Happiness,” Joe came on at the end of the segment and said incredulously, “I leave the set for one minute, and we turn into the fifth hour of the ‘Today’ show?” Mika retorted, “Do you have a problem with that?” Joe turned to their fellow host and said: “Nobody can complete you, Willie. Only you can complete yourself.”
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In this parallel universe you’ll also find that the hosts and guests are genuinely, thoroughly, discussing the news, debating it and laughing over its absurdities, hour after hour. Joe is an opinionated conservative, and a former Republican congressman from Florida, while Mika is a (moderate) liberal, and the daughter of Zbigniew Brzezinski, the national security adviser during the Carter administration.
Joe sometimes enrages MSNBC’s liberal viewers with his Republican attitudes — as in late March, when the health-care reform bill was passed, and for a week or so “Morning Joe” took on a Fox News-like partisan air. This is his prerogative; it’s his program. It’s Mika’s prerogative to push back, but she doesn’t always exercise that muscle. Like a diplomatic wife, her instinct is to let him and the other obstreperous guests hold forth, when they are so inclined, and to reprove gently, if at all possible.
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The creation story behind this journalistic gallimaufry is worthy of an episode of “30 Rock.” In March 2007, Joe was in Florida, broadcasting his MSNBC program “Scarborough Country” when MSNBC assigned a freelancer to deliver the news segment from New Jersey. That person was Mika, who had worked in the news media for 20 years, and had been abruptly fired from CBS on May 2, her birthday, the previous year. Joe, who had never met her, was struck by Mika’s jesting tone when she signed off, “And now, back to Scarborough Country.”
On a boat the next day, his friends told him, “Dude she’s making fun of your show!” The thought intrigued him. A few weeks later, when MSNBC canceled the “Imus in the Morning” program (after its host, Don Imus, made insensitive remarks about the Rutgers women’s basketball team), Joe traveled to Secaucus, N.J., with his producer, Chris Licht, to pitch a program to MSNBC’s president, Phil Griffin, to fill the Imus slot. The concept, Mr. Licht explained last month, was, “Hard news for three hours, not formulaic, not focus-grouped, just intelligent people having intelligent discussions about major topics.” Joe wanted to find a fellow host who could stand her ground against him, not a glorified “prompter-reader.”
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