I dont know who the next president will be, but it appears some of the medias most powerful executives have a hunch and are acquiescing accordingly.

In the wake of the attempted assassination of former President Donald Trump on Saturday at a campaign rally in Butler, Pennsylvania, NBC made the curious decision to tell Joe Scarborough, one of its most well-known and experienced anchors, and his co-host Mika Brzezinski to take Monday morning off.

According to the network, there was no political motivation behind the move sharing via a statement that given the gravity and complexity of this unfolding story, it would be best to have one news feed covering this developing situation.

It sounds fine on its surface, but after the network told Morning Joe hosts, producers and staff members its decision, the show was not preempted by NBCs flagship morning news show, Today, which aired as usual. Instead, MSNBC viewers awoke to coverage from the companys digital news service, NBC News Now.

As for the promise that other MSNBC shows like Deadline: White House would face the same fate as Morning Joe, those shows went on without interruption, which sparked the ire of Scarborough and Brzezinski. The shows co-hosts, who married in 2018, made their disappointment about the discrepancy abundantly clear live on air the following day.

We were told, in no uncertain terms, on a Sunday evening that there was going to be one news feed across all NBC news channels yesterday we were going to stay as a network in breaking news mode throughout all day yesterday, Scarborough said of Mondays telecast .

We dont know why that didnt happen, he continued. Our team was not given a good answer as to why that didnt happen, but it didnt happen.

We were also told it was going to happen throughout the day, and I guess, after there was such a strong blowback about yesterday morning, I guess they changed their plans, he added. We were very surprised, we were very disappointed.

Scarborough expressed more than dismay, though, offering what sounded like a threat to his bosses: Next time we are told there is going to be a news feed replacing us, we will be in our chairs and the news feed will be us, or they can get somebody else to host the show.

The network has not responded directly to the comments, but a network insider told Page Six that Scarborough and Brzezinski are acting childish and immature and just need to grow up.

Thats some slick talk coming from someone hiding under the cloud of anonymity. While I doubt millionaire news anchors need me to come to their rescue, Scarborough and Brzezinski have done absolutely nothing wrong in this instance and their sidelining ought to be widely condemned.

Because, regardless of the assurances made by NBC executives, it was incredibly difficult to believe there were no political calculations behind the decision to pull Morning Joe from the air Monday.

After all, it was only a few months ago that NBC reversed its decision to hire former Republican National Committee Chair Ronna McDaniel as a contributor following an on-air revolt led by NBC News chief political analyst Chuck Todd.

It was fairly evident by that initial hiring choice which kind of viewer was valued more by the top brass at the network, so it made sense when CNNs Oliver Darcy reported that a person familiar with the call to yank Morning Joe off the air Monday claimed the determination was made over concerns a guest might make an inappropriate comment that could be used to assail the program and network as a whole.

Inappropriate to whom?

Well, MSNBC is owned by NBC, which is owned by Comcast, and the chair of Comcast, Brian Roberts, has been criticized by Trump more than once.

Last year, Trump described Roberts as a slime ball and argued the government should come down hard on them and make them pay for their supposedly illegal political activity. Trump also routinely refers to MSNBC as MSDNC.

As a fairly regular viewer of Morning Joe, I can attest that many of the shows guests offend me all the time. This includes regulars like Donny Deutsch ; the shows favorite mayor, New Yorks Eric Adams; and some of those never Trump Republicans who still cant grasp how some of their rhetoric and ideology is directly responsible for the nightmare we live in now.

Im sure the police force having as favorable representation on Morning Joe as they enjoy on Blue Bloods might not be every viewers thing either (because I know its not mine).

Still, I know what I signed up for when I turn on the show in the morning, and I know how to turn it off when I find myself drowning in too much morning conservatism.

And to the credit of Scarborough and Brzezinski, despite Trump falsely accusing him of being a murderer and attacking her appearance every so often, they both treat Trump fairly respectfully.

Even if they didnt, viewers should be allowed to make their own choices rather than have network executives make them especially out of fear of Trumps retribution.

But that is not whats seemingly happening at MSNBC and elsewhere, as Semafor has reported that other news organizations have tried to measure their coverage in response to Republican anger.

This fear extends to the entertainment industry, too.

In May, The Apprentice, a biopic about Trumps early years directed by Iranian filmmaker Ali Abbasi, earned rave reviews when it premiered at the Cannes Film Festival. Yet despite all the acclaim, the film has struggled to find a buyer . Privately, the people behind the work, which features Sebastian Stan as the young Trump and Successions Jeremy Strong as lawyer and political fixer Roy Cohn, feel their difficulties in finding a distribution deal speak to companies operating out of fear, because releasing the movie could land them on Trumps bad side, a potentially dangerous place to be given that he is currently leading President Biden in the polls, according to Variety .

The previous Trump administration sued to block the merger of AT&T and Time Warner over the then-presidents anger toward CNN . Likewise, although Trump never made good on his past promises to go after the broadcast licenses of news networks over fake news, he has talked more forcefully about it in the past year. He often mentions MSNBC as a target.

Do we really believe none of this is on the minds of those running MSNBCs parent company as they consider future media and acquisition deals?

There are valid reasons to worry that Trumps return to the White House might result in him leveraging his position to block deals and using different regulatory agencies to scrutinize the operations of entities he feels are inadequately obedient to him. I can understand how impossible the situation might feel, and that ultimately, a business has to protect its bottom line. On the other hand, this deference to Trump and his supporters is not supposed to be the business of news or how we should consume art.

Its a shame that the talent of these companies understand this but their bosses fail to. Hopefully they repeat the sentiment on air for as long as they still can.