MSNBC host Joe Scarborough questioned the relevance of his own show Wednesday after a study found that one-fifth of Americans regularly get their news from social media influencers.
“That’s a challenge for a lot of mainstream media sources. How do they make themselves relevant again?” Scarborough asked. “I find this hard to believe that younger voters would be more interested in getting an entertaining 20-second news snippet than watching a cable news show for four hours from 6 a.m. to 10 a.m. It seems like an easy choice here!”
A Pew Research Center study published Monday found that one in five Americans—and 40 percent of Americans under 30—regularly receive news from news influencers on social media. Most news influencers have X accounts, followed by Instagram and YouTube, according to the study.
“I don’t know how we make ourselves relevant again,” Morning Joe panelist Mike Barnicle said. “We can’t compete with 20-second snippets on an iPhone walking up the street, getting your entire news digest of the day in less than a minute on your phone as you’re walking in the crowd with a coffee in one hand and your phone in the other. I don’t know how we catch up to that.”
Washington Post columnist Eugene Robinson also said he didn’t know how to compete with social media influencers.
“What is wrong with these people?” he said. “Look, if I knew the answer, I would implement it immediately and reverse this trend.”
“The truth is, we don’t know how to compete with social media basket-making influencers or whatever they are, but we must,” Robinson continued. “We’ve got to figure out ways to do it. Maybe we create our own 20-second snippets. We need to … meet news consumers where they are because they’re not here, and that’s the problem.”
Scarborough and cohost Mika Brzezinski started a firestorm after visiting President-elect Trump at Mar-a-Lago on Friday. Following years of denouncing Trump, the couple wanted to “restart communications.” The move led liberals like Rosie O’Donnell to abandon watching the show.
MSNBC has faced its own relevance issue, with ratings declining by as much as 50 percent in the days following Trump’s victory. Comcast recently announced that it would spin off the new channel along with other struggling TV assets.
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