There’s an old adage in business that goes something like, “Anybody can manage people. The best managers know how to manage egos.”
One’s mileage may vary on that sentiment, but one thing that’s apparently undeniable: The employees of left-leaning news network MSNBC are increasingly thinking that their managers are unable to manage neither people nor egos.
A blistering report from The Daily Beast chronicled the aftermath of the network’s curious decision to abruptly upend its “Morning Joe” program on Monday, less than 48 hours after a failed assassination attempt on former President Donald Trump in Butler, Pennsylvania.
MSNBC reportedly felt that the chances of something truly incendiary being uttered on the program — hosted by well-documented husband-and-wife Trump critics Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski — wasn’t worth the risk.
According to The Daily Beast’s reporting, that risk calculation wasn’t quite calculating enough because employees are none too happy with how any of the ensuing fallout played out.
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The report noted that employees are grappling with “intense frustration,” with much of it aimed at the very top of the company.
NBC News Group President Cesar Conde and MSNBC President Rashida Jones have been the prime recipients of this ire.
Even sans the Beast’s reporting, it wasn’t exactly a secret that Scarborough and Brzezinski weren’t happy with this decision from Conde and Jones.
As CNN and other outlets chronicled, Scarborough blasted MSNBC leadership for the decision.
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“We don’t know why that was that didn’t happen. Our team was not given a good answer as to why that didn’t happen,” Scarborough said upon returning to his regularly-scheduled slot on Tuesday. “But it didn’t happen.”
“We were also told it was going to happen throughout the day, and I guess, after there was such a strong blowback about yesterday morning, I guess they changed their plans,” Scarborough continued.
He added: “We were very surprised. We were very disappointed.”
Scarborough also threw in a thinly-veiled threat about quitting if this ever happened again.
“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,” Scarborough said defiantly. “The news feed will be us, or they can get somebody else to host the show.”
According to The Daily Beast, that little monologue helped lead to “a crescendo Tuesday, with people inside the network and close to the situation dumbfounded as to how executives could have created a situation that allowed its top stars to go scorched earth on them for the second time in four months.”
The off-the-record quotes collected in the report buttressed that “crescendo.”
“The buck stops with Cesar,” one source said.
“There is a level of disappointment and disillusion in our leadership in a way that is unlike anything before,” one MSNBC staffer told The Daily Beast.
One MSNBC staffer suggested that MSNBC was already trying to warm up to a possible Trump administration.
“There’s no world in which any of this makes sense unless Comcast is attempting to curry favor,” one MSNBC employee said.
