New Jersey Governor Chris Christie tells The New York Times Magazine about his once hot, now quite cold relationship with MSNBC, and in particular, with Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski of “Morning Joe,” where Christie was once a regular.
In the profile by Mark Leibovich that appears in print Sunday, but published online Thursday, Christie says the chummy relationship he had at MSNBC dried up as Bridge-gate exploded:
“There’s an agenda at the network level at MSNBC,” Christie told me. “All these folks have to march in line in order to keep their jobs.” I asked Christie if he thought Scarborough and Brzezinski were taking orders from corporate bosses. “I don’t know,” he said. “But it seems to me there is a completely different approach to me than they were approaching me in the past.” (When I asked Scarborough if this was true, he said: “We saw him at the Vanity Fair-Bloomberg party last spring, and he stormed right past us. Mika and I just looked at each other and laughed. It’s a question of temperament with him.”) Yet Christie did not seem entirely displeased with this turn of events, either. Haley Barbour, the former governor of Mississippi and former chairman of the Republican National Committee, said, “A lot of people who vote in our primaries think that if MSNBC attacks you for a month, you must be better than I thought you were.”
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