Mika Brzezinski

Mika Brzezinski was a TV host, author, and political commentator, best known as the co-host and occasional foil to Joe Scarborough on the news and talk program "Morning Joe" (MSNBC, 2007-). Born in New York City, Brzezinski was the daughter of foreign policy advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski and artist Emilie Edvard Benesova. She was raised mostly near Washington DC, and received a degree in English from Williams College in Williamstown, MA. Brzezinski began her career in journalism in 1990, as an assistant at ABC's "World News This Morning." After bouncing around a few affiliate stations in Hartford, CT, she joined CBS as a correspondent. In 2001, Brzezinski briefly worked on the MSNBC afternoon program "HomePage," where she and co-anchors Gina Gaston and Ashleigh Banfield earned themselves the nickname "the Powerpuff Girls of journalism." She returned to CBS in September of 2001, where she reported from Ground Zero on 9/11 live when the South Tower of the World Trade Center collapsed. For the next six years, Brzezinski worked at CBS as a correspondent, substitute anchor, and segment anchor for breaking news. She returned to MSNBC in January of 2007, where she was quickly tapped to be co-host to former Republican congressman Joe Scarborough and Willie Geist on their weekday morning news program "Morning Joe" (MSNBC, 2007-). Brzezinski's leftist political leanings often led to fireworks between her and Scarborough, who butted heads on issues such as wage equality (Brzezinski was not afraid to call out the fact that she was paid less than her male counterparts), trivial journalism (Brzezinski once famously refused to read a story about Paris Hilton on air, claiming it to be irrelevant compared to the war in Iraq, leading to much mockery from Scarborough), and the 2016 presidential election. Brzezinski claimed she was under pressure from the DNC to shift her on air support from Bernie Sanders to Hillary Clinton, while Scarborough was often accused of "normalizing" the divisive rhetoric of Republican front-runner Donald Trump.