Editor's Update: Thanks to tipster Jim Trotter who reminded us that back in February, Joe and the Brew Crew spent almost 4 minutes talking about Chris Lee's shirtless pic. (video at link)
Yesterday, this column jibed Joe Scarborough & Co. for blacking out, during Morning Joe's first half-hour, coverage of Anthony Weiner's epic news conference of the day before.
Today, a defiant Scarborough dismissed the criticism the show received, boasting "we'll talk about what we feel like talking about."
When the show opened today, it at first seemed that Scarborough was about to make amends for yesterday's poor news judgment. But Joe's mock contrition was just a set-up for a joke.
View video after the jump.
Watch Scarborough shrug off criticism for having blown a very big story.
JOE SCARBOROUGH: Of course, a lot of people were very upset by our coverage yesterday morning, on the right. A lot of conservatives believe that we paid short shrift to a certain story, and for that we apologize. We're going to double-down today and talk about the story you wanted us to talk about yesterday. Willie Geist: so let's get into it. What kind of impact does the seige of the Peruvian mines have on that election?
WILLIE GEIST: Right. How much time do you have?
. . .
SCARBOROUGH: There's a lot to talk about this morning. And as usual we'll talk about what we feel like talking about. Mike Barnicle, we had all these people emailing, and tweeting, "very disappointed in you that you didn't spend three hours talking about Anthony Weiner." You know, we saw the press conference the day before, and it was just a carnival. And there was important news on Afghanistan, and we thought that more important.
When Hugh Hefner's lefty daughter, Christine, later appeared, she congratulated Joe on burying the Weinergate story and claimed Morning Joe viewers were happy about it.
CHRISTINE HEFNER: I was listening when you were talking about getting some blowback on not spending more time yesterday. And I think that's a risk of, you hear from relatively few people and it seems as if it's representative of your audience, and I'd be willing to be if you actually went out and talked to your audience, people were very happy with the relative weighting you gave on the stories.
SCARBOROUGH: Oh yeah. We had a lot of people thank us.
No doubt. After all, Debbie Wasserman-Schultz, Paul Krugman and Nancy Pelosi are known to watch Morning Joe.
