MSNBC Announces Morning Joe Will Expand to a Fourth Hour Starting April 4th

MSNBC’s long-running morning show, Morning Joe, will officially go from three hours to four full hours on Monday, April 4th.

The weekday show, which has been a staple of MSNBC’s programming for the last 15 years, will take over the 9 a.m. to 10 a.m. hour left empty by Stephanie Ruhle, who is replacing Brian Williams at 11 p.m. on the network. The swapping out of Ruhle’s 9 a.m. show, Stephanie Ruhle Reports, for an extra hour of Morning Joe is also notable as MSNBC is replacing a heavily news-based program with a more opinion-oriented one.

Joe Scarborough, Mike Brzezinski, and Willie Geist will cohost all four hours. CNN reported last week MSNBC contributors and regular fixtures on the show, Eugene Daniels and Katty Kay, may also take on more “formal roles” as the show expands.

Hosting four hours a day may seem like an impossible task, but Scarborough and Brzezinski already seem to have a few tricks up their sleeves to make it work. The program regularly re-airs segments in the 8 a.m. hour from the previous two hours, undoubtedly taking advantage of the fact that almost no one watches all three hours of the program – a tactic likely to be used as the show moves to four hours.

Additionally, as Mediaite’s Colby Hall reported in August of 2021, both Scarborough and Brzezinski regularly take vacation days to recharge. Hall notes that in the summer of 2021 “only 49 percent of the episodes of Morning Joe that aired from Memorial Day weekend to Labor Day weekend featured both hosts.”

Morning Joe ended 2021 with a 12-year run beating CNN’s New Day from 6 to 9 a.m., in terms of total viewers, and set to continue that dominance. The show, however, ranks a solid second behind industry leader Fox & Friends, which dominates cable news early in the morning, often pulling in over a million total viewers.

Scarborough, a former Republican congressman from Florida, and Brzezinski were married in November of 2018. Brzezinski’s father, Zbigniew Brzezinski, served as national security adviser to President Jimmy Carter.

The two hosts have become iconic figures in the cable news industry and often set the tone for MSNBC’s daily coverage of political events and national news. Both Scarborough and Brzezinski raised their national profiles during the Trump presidency as outspoken critics of the Trump administration – often drawing on their past personal relationships with Trump to color their commentary.

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