Mika Brzezinski Once Made 14 Times Less Than Joe Scarborough on ‘Morning Joe’: Why She Almost Quit

While she is now one of the most recognizable faces on morning television, Morning Joe’s Mika Brzezinski once admitted she was about to quit the show over a major pay disparity.

“It was a painful decision. But after nearly 20 years of scrambling up, down, and back up the television-news ladder several times over, I was done,” she said in her 2011 book, Knowing Your Value. “I was demoralized — and not because I didn’t like my job. In fact, I loved it. No other show I’d ever worked on had such energy and so much excitement.”

“But as I explained to Joe [Scarborough] on that sad, cold winter morning, I could no longer work for a network that refused to recognize my value,” she wrote. “It may have taken me 40 years, but I’d finally realized it was time to do things right or not at all. Despite my professional experience, the 15-hour workdays, and a successful new show that I had helped build, MSNBC was still refusing to pay me what I was worth. Not only was my salary lower than my colleagues’, each month was a financial scramble to make ends meet.”

The conversation with Joe, 61, took place in 2008, one year after they began cohosting Morning Joe, Mika, 57, revealed. She said that she sat with a group of male colleagues every morning, “all of whom made much more than I did. In fact, our salaries weren’t even close.”

In the book, Mika said that Joe was making 14 times more money than her. After telling Joe she was ready to mark her exit from Morning Joe in 2008, he helped encourage her to lead the effort to get a salary increase.

“​​Joe knew I wasn’t being paid what I was worth and had been fighting for me all along, but so far his efforts had been in vain,” she revealed. “He asked for a few more days. As always, Joe had a plan.”

Mika explained that “instead of blaming it on MSNBC” she blamed herself for not understanding her “value.” Eventually, she was able to negotiate a higher salary with boss Phil Griffin. She ultimately ended up staying on the show, where she still currently works. Mika and Joe got married in 2018.

Joe shared the story from his point of view while speaking to HuffPost in May 2011.

“We woke up one day, and at that point I was making 14 times the amount that Mika was making, and at that point you go back and say, ‘this just doesn’t work, we’ve got to renegotiate,'” he recalled. “And the attitude is, ‘You all both signed your contracts. Tough luck.'”

The experience of finding her own voice inspired Mika to launch the Know Your Value movement, helping working women around the country recognize their value.

“We are leading. We are making money. We are spending money. We are at our wisest. And we have, at this time in our lives, the least amount of f–ks,” she told Politico on October 25 about breaking the misconceptions about women over 50 in the workforce. “That makes us much more valuable than at 50, 40, at 30 and 20. Everything is coming into place for us so that we can use the attitudes, the wisdom and the experience that we bring to the table to be effective for ourselves and for our fellow women. And we’re doing it.”