MSNBC’s Attacks on Pete Hegseth Are Not About Trump — It’s About Fox News
For 20 days, MSNBC has accelerated its attacks on former Fox News host Pete Hegseth, who made headwinds when President-elect Donald Trump nominated him as his defense secretary. On Monday, “Morning Joe” host Joe Scarborough led with what he called “breaking news” to further humiliate the former “Fox & Friends Weekend” co-host, this time digging into a two-day-old report on Hegseth’s mother’s recanted email from 2018.
Six years ago, Penelope Hegseth excoriated her son in a personal email, which she told the New York Times on Friday that she sent “in anger, with emotion” as Hegseth was undergoing a painful divorce from his second wife, with whom he shares three children.
Morning Joe leads first hour with what Scarborough called “breaking news” coverage of Pete Hegseth’s mother’s email from 2018, which she has since taken back. pic.twitter.com/KKTiq59LBD
— Julianna Frieman (@JuliannaFrieman) December 2, 2024
Overlooking the irony of deprioritizing coverage of President Joe Biden’s pardon of drug-addled, sex-crazed son Hunter, Scarborough and his panel offered no quarter to then-returning veteran Hegseth’s brief alcohol problem and alleged troubles with women. Nor did the “Morning Joe” crew mull for one moment over the veracity of Momma Hegseth’s recovered email, a far cry from MSNBC’s claims of Russian hacking that headlined the Hunter Biden laptop scandal.
According to Scarborough, Hegseth is one of Trump’s “most dangerous” and “unqualified” nominees — but this is not the criticism of Trump that meets the eye of MSNBC’s remaining viewers.
Morning Joe refers to Pete Hegseth and Kash Patel as President-elect Donald Trump’s “most dangerous” and “unqualified” nominees. pic.twitter.com/oT1iEYDW7V
— Julianna Frieman (@JuliannaFrieman) December 2, 2024
The same week (Nov. 11-17) Hegseth made history as Trump’s unconventional Department of Defense nominee, Fox News posted a historic 1.9 million average viewers — the highest share of cable news audience among total days in the network’s 28-year existence. Meanwhile, MSNBC’s postelection coverage raked in just 487,000 total viewers in a blush-worthy underperformance to even the Hallmark Channel.
Comcast, the parent company of NBCUniversal, announced on Nov. 20 that it will separate MSNBC, among other channels, from NBC News in a new spinoff company.
“The transaction will be structured as a tax-free spin to existing shareholders,” Comcast President Mike Cavanagh explained in an internal memo. “While we don’t have a precise timetable for completing the transition, we are estimating that it will take approximately a year.”
Joe and Mika do not care about Pete Hegseth’s character or potential impact on the nation. From a private meeting with Trump at Mar-a-Lago — their first in seven years — to desperate rants against the social media “gutter” of independent journalism on Elon Musk’s X platform, their motivations are clear — “Morning Joe” hopes to level the playing field with Fox News in a final effort to prevent its own demise.
For MSNBC, Hegseth is an effigy. He represents everything the network is trying to defeat but can’t seem to escape: the growing dominance of conservative media among the country’s masses. By focusing so heavily on Hegseth’s past struggles through unfounded allegations, they are trying to make a stranger of a man whose TV warmth and undeniable influence has been a familiar face in thousands of American households.
With multimillion-dollar salaries at stake, relentless scrutiny of Hegseth is more than just a personal vendetta. It is part of MSNBC’s larger, increasingly demoralized battle for relevance.
With its ratings clogging the toilet of leftist corporate media as Fox’s soar through the roof, MSNBC’s fixation on Hegseth appears to be a thinly veiled strategy to create an anti-Trump narrative for its dwindling audience. But this strategy is backfiring in real-time. The more MSNBC fixates on Hegseth, the more it reaffirms itself as a network more concerned with attacking its political enemies than addressing substantial issues important to the American electorate.
Like politicians, corporate media outlets must meet audiences where they are. Viewers vote with their eyes, and right now, Fox News is winning by a landslide. The more Scarborough and his colleagues hammer away at Hegseth’s past, the more they alienate viewers who are tired of the same predictable, ideologically driven coverage.
Repetition of phrases like “abuser of women” and “sexual assault” may stoke the fire of its remaining audience, but MSNBC will never ignite the same conflagration that enshrouded Fox News at the height of the #MeToo movement.
In the long run, the fight for dominance in the American media landscape is being won not by those who can scream the loudest or attack most viciously, but by those who balance fair reporting with the interest of its viewers. Fox News, for all its imperfections, tapped into this future — one where the media isn’t just about reflecting the views of the political elite but speaking directly to the people, with all their complexity, frustration, and hope for change.
And as MSNBC continues to flail in its attempt to tear down that vision, it becomes increasingly clear that the real threat to its survival is not Pete Hegseth, but the very media revolution he represents.
Julianna Frieman is a freelance writer published by the Daily Caller, Headline USA, The Federalist, and The American Spectator. Follow her on Twitter at @JuliannaFrieman.
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