Technical issues sent MSNBC on a Tuesday-morning scramble.
The NBCUniversal-backed cable news outlet was forced to run more than ten minutes of promos and ads and a snippet of a repeat from Lawrence O’Donnell’s primetime show just after 6 a.m. as engineers and staffers grappled with an as-yet-unknown glitch that kept “Morning Joe” from coming on the air at its usual time. Finally, “Morning Joe” co-anchor Mika Brzezinski surfaced on air at about 6:11 a.m. to kick off the program and apologize for the delay.
“Thanks for bearing with us, everybody,” Brzezinski. Viewers had initially seen a shot of the U.S. Capitol at the top of the hour along with some of the strains of The Who’s seminal rock song “Baba O’Riley.”
MSNBC declined to comment. Jonathan Lemire, the anchor of the 5 a.m. program, “Way Too Early,” cited “technical difficulties” via a post on the social-media platform X.
Lemire also suffered from disruption on Tuesday. Part of his program was affected by garbled video, and MSNBC ended up running a repeat of part of “The Rachel Maddow Show” while it tried to solve the problem.
Lemire got more air time after “Morning Joe” started on the air.
“Morning Joe” is one of MSNBC’s signature programs, and features one of the longest-running teams in morning TV. Co-anchors Joe Scarborough, Mika Brzezinski and Willie Geist have led the program since it debuted in 2007. Scarborough and Brzezinski, now married, often lead the program from a studio in Florida while Geist keeps the chatter going in New York among a panel of regular guests and analysts.