The video: "Sexist." "Icky." "Obnoxious." The reviews aren't good for a new promo for MSNBC's Morning Joe. (Watch it below.) The three-minute spot features the show's co-host, Mika Brzezinski, getting up early, making lunch for the kids, feeding the dog, then donning a skimpy running outfit before jogging to work through the streets of New York. Meanwhile, her male co-hosts — Willie Geist and Joe Scarborough — are shown drinking, smoking, gambling, and partying all night with young women. They just barely manage to put down the whiskey bottles and make it to 30 Rock in time for the show. There, they're greeted by a prim, crisply clad Brzezinski who gives them a sexy "tsk-tsk" look.
The reaction: "The whole segment reads like a Judd Apatow approach to the working woman," says Amy Tennery at Mogulite. I don't want to see "Brzezinski acting like a boozed up adolescent... But I'd rather not see her treated like the Morning Joe's RA, either." Like Morning Joe itself, this promo is all about "sexy Mika" scolding the "bad little boys," says Glynnis MacNicol at Business Insider. It's a dynamic that's "increasingly hard to watch." Maybe this ad should have featured a shark "for Mika to jump over on her epic morning run." C'mon, "it's called self-deprecating humor," Brzezinski says in a statement. Yeah, says Scarborough. "The ad mocks me as a screwup and portrays Mika as the powerhouse behind the show" — "how is that sexist?" Judge for yourself:
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