Former President Donald Trump went after a couple of MSNBC anchors Monday, releasing a statement attacking “Morning Joe” co-host Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski. 

“Will Morning Joe be canceled? He and Mika’s ratings are very low—they are having an extremely hard time finding an audience to listen to the Fake News they spurn. Losing them would be very sad—hope it doesn’t happen!” Trump’s statement said. 

Scarborough appeared surprised and charmed by the former president releasing a statement to attack their show out of nowhere.

While Scarborough was having fun with Trump’s statement, Brzezinski added by saying, “we do spurn Fake News” as the entire panel laughed at the former president’s choice of word to use in his statement. 

“I never heard him talk about spurn, using that as a word,” Scarborough said. “I don’t use the word; it’s new vocabulary! Secondly, he can’t quit us! Even says that would be a shame, that would be a shame, with Morning Joe.”

“Well, thank you, Mr. President, we appreciate that we’ve been talking football for two hours; I’m surprised… he likes football, Rev you’d think, he likes boxing. You think maybe he’d write a little about our commentary on the Cowboys game or, I don’t know, perhaps talk about MLK Day.”

CNN is mourning the loss of their stage manager Jay Conroy, who died over the weekend. On Monday, anchors Jim Sciutto and Poppy Harlow paid an emotional tribute to Conroy. 

Details surrounding the death of Conroy, including cause and exact time, aren’t known to the public. Nonetheless, Sciutto called Conroy “a deeply special person” who, among other things, shepherded the staff at CNN to safety following a 2018 bomb threat. 

“We’ve lost a friend at CNN. Jay Conroy was a stage manager – and so much more,” CNN’s Brian Stelter said on Twitter. 

“He was a producer, greeter, fixer, hype man, unsung hero for anchors and guests. Just last month, he ran two hours’ worth of Reliable Sources tapings with a 1000-watt smile, putting us all at ease.”

Before joining CNN, Conroy worked backstage with various bands. Furthermore, in 2012 CNN stunned him on camera as the network provided their stage manager with an in-person meeting with Conroy’s favorite band, Aerosmith.

“Jay brought out the best in us, every show, every time. I think that’s because he was a broadcaster in his own right, hosting his own hard rock show. He knew how to prep us, and he knew how to make us laugh,” Stelter added. 

Former President Donald Trump provided cable television news channels with a lot of material during his four years in charge. In an appearance on NewsNation’s “Dan Abrams Live,” Ted Koppel stated his displeasure towards the news media on how they covered Trump. 

“I’m terribly concerned that when you talk about the New York Times these days, when you talk about the Washington Post these days,” Koppel said. 

“We’re not talking about the New York Times of 50 years ago. We are not talking about the Washington Post of 50 years ago. We’re talking about organizations that I believe have, in fact, decided as organizations that Donald J. Trump is bad for the United States.”

The former “Nightline” anchor conveyed his views about media bias and his desire that news versus opinion had a more significant discrepancy.

“I think opinion belongs on the opinion page. That’s why they call it the op-ed section,” Koppel said. “That’s where the opinion pieces are, the columns, that’s where the editorials are, and that’s where it belongs. I don’t like seeing opinion being expressed on the front page of a great newspaper.”

Abrams said that Trump feels like a particular case as he’s one of the most polarizing figures in American politics, so the way the media covers him has to be different. Nonetheless, Koppel disagreed. 

“Do you feel that way about anybody else in politics?,” he asked. “Are we going to start picking up our morning newspaper to see who is in and who is out, in terms of the news coverage? Again, there’s a place for that in the op-ed section. I don’t like it on the front page.”