Joe Scarborough Profile…

New York Magazine’s Mark Binelli profiles Joe Scarborough…

Scarborough admits that he is courting a new constituency. “Once we started Morning Joe, Phil Griffin said to me, ‘You can cut out this regular-Joe crap. Our audience is from Boston to Washington, D.C.’” In fact, he seems to be right at home on the Upper West Side. “The thing I hear all the time,” he says, “when people come up to me on the street, is ‘I love your show,’ and then there’s a hesitancy, and I’ll finish their sentence: ‘And I’m a liberal?’” Scarborough beams, pleased with his own apostasy, before adding, “Republicans aren’t as gracious.”

The past few months have been volatile at MSNBC. The network managed to boost its profile during the unusually dramatic primary season but also became a target of both the right (as the home of Keith Olbermann) and the left (when Chris Matthews was accused of sexism). Then came the sudden death last month of Tim Russert, NBC News’ Washington bureau chief, host of Meet the Press, and a regular presence on Morning Joe and other MSNBC shows. “Andrea Mitchell, myself, all of us in the Washington bureau—Morning Joe has become a staple for us,” Russert told me two weeks before he died.

“It’s like a bomb’s gone off, and everyone’s just doing their best to recover,” Scarborough says of Russert’s death. He seems reluctant to make much of their friendship, mocking the “long line of carnival barkers trying to associate themselves with Tim.” But eventually he says, “It’s been much more staggering personally than professionally. At the memorial service, when Springsteen appeared, I thought, God, please don’t play ‘Thunder Road.’ He did. That’s the first time I put my head in my arms and lost it. I’d never seen him more like a kid than when I heard him talking about seeing Springsteen play that song.”

Russert had chuckled when I brought up the recent partisan critiques of NBC News. “That’s nothing new,” he said. Besides, with someone like Scarborough, “it’s not as if people are trying to present him as a news anchor. He’s not. But even though he’s a conservative Republican, he’s not afraid to criticize his own party. And I think people find that refreshing.”