This week, telecom giant Comcast announced plans to divest itself of its most popular media properties. CNBC and MSNBC, along with other popular cable assets, will be spun off into a new company called SpinCo. The move will significantly boost those assets from their longtime home, Comcast’s NBC broadcast network.
It is not clear what comes next. Comcast has said that MSNBC and other spun-off media properties are not for sale, though that hasn’t stopped rampant speculation about that. In general, it doesn’t seem to be a particularly promising sign for the brands being released. CNN’s Matt Egan notes that “spinoff cable channels will have less financial protection from the volatility of the TV industry” now that they are cut off from “Comcast’s parentage and stable cash flow.”
Never one to miss an opportunity to insert himself where he’s not welcome, tech billionaire Elon Musk decided to make a joke by buying a liberal news channel on Friday. This started when Donald Trump Jr., tagged Musk in a post about MSNBC’s transition away from Comcast, writing: “Hey @elonmusk I have the funniest idea ever!!!”
Musk replied: “How much does it cost?”
“I mean it won’t be much. Look at the ratings,” Trump Jr. said.
Later, podcasting executive Joe Rogan joined the thread: “If you buy MSNBC, I’d love Rachael Maddow’s career. I will wear the same clothes and glasses, and I will tell the same lies.”
MSNBC may find itself particularly vulnerable, given the personal animosity between itself and the incoming President (Donald Trump). Anyone who has even tuned in to MSNBC in the past decade will know that its viewership basically goes up and down based on how much negative Trump coverage the station can muster. As the New York Times put it, while the network “once devoted itself” to “editing the news,” it is now “full” mostly of “Trump-bashing opinion leaders.” As legal and other attacks on the media by the incoming administration are expected, those within the news organization may find themselves under pressure.
Why Comcast is turning to MSNBC is currently unclear. Although the channel’s ratings have fluctuated over the years, they have not fared well compared to other peer news channels. MSNBC’s audience size grew steadily between 2016 and 2020, although that audience (mostly) has been in decline since then. By 2022, MSNBC’s prime-time and daily viewers are down, along with its profits, while the network’s prime competitor, Fox News, is up sharply, a study by Pew Research shows. Last year there was a conflict of interest for the channel, however, since the election, viewership has decreased again.
None of this is particularly surprising, since network news is a dying medium. Deadline writes that while the news network’s viewership is up this year because of the election, the network’s numbers are still “out of the 2020 cycle, which was a boom year for linear TV overall.”
Musk has bought media platforms before. While it seems highly unlikely that he would get his paws on MSNBC, if he did, it’s easy to imagine that it would be a total disaster. Apparently, Musk hates news networks and journalists. Like Trump, he has called social media “fake news,” and leftist “propaganda,” and he regularly encourages people to use his social media platform, X, as a source of “information.” Musk and other conservatives also want to destroy the reputation of the public news networks, and have openly asked for their money back.
Since he took over Twitter and renamed it X, the social network has seen the advertiser exit and since October, it has lost 80 percent of its value according to a report by investor Fidelity. If Musk’s goal is to cash out MSNBC, buying it may be the fastest route.
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