This week, telecom large Comcast announced plans to divest itself from a few of its most well-known media properties. CNBC and MSNBC, in addition to different widespread cable property, will probably be spun off from the conglomerate into a brand new firm tentatively referred to as SpinCo. The transfer will decisively extreme these property from their longtime residence, Comcast’s NBC broadcast community.
It’s not precisely clear what comes subsequent. Comcast has claimed that MSNBC and different spun-off media properties should not up on the market, although that hasn’t stopped rampant hypothesis about that being the case. Typically, it doesn’t look like a very hopeful signal for the manufacturers which are being unloaded. Matt Egan, at CNN, notes that “the spinoff cable channels may have much less monetary safety from the volatility of the TV trade” now that they’ve been minimize off “from the Comcast mothership and its steady money flows.”
By no means lacking a possibility to insert himself the place he’s not welcome, tech billionaire Elon Musk determined to joke about buying the liberal information channel on Friday. This began when Donald Trump Jr., tagged Musk in a put up about MSNBC’s transition away from Comcast, writing: “Hey @elonmusk I’ve the funniest thought ever!!!”
Musk replied: “How a lot does it price?”
“I imply it could’t be a lot. Take a look at the scores,” Trump Jr. quipped.
Later, podcasting magnate Joe Rogan joined the thread: “Should you purchase MSNBC, I would really like Rachael Maddow’s job. I’ll put on the identical outfit and glasses, and I’ll inform the identical lies.”
MSNBC could discover itself in a very susceptible place, given the private animosity between itself and the incoming President (Donald Trump). Anybody who has even handed throughout MSNBC over the previous decade will know that its viewership mainly rises and falls primarily based on how much negative Trump coverage the channel can muster. Because the New York Occasions has put it, whereas the community “as soon as devoted” itself to “information programming,” it has now come to be “occupied” by predominantly “Trump-bashing opinion hosts.” As legal and other attacks on the media by the incoming administration are expected, these throughout the information group could discover themselves stressing out.
Simply why Comcast is spinning off MSNBC at this level is a little bit unclear. Whereas the channel’s scores have gone up and down over time, they haven’t underperformed relative to different peer information channels. MSNBC’s viewers dimension grew steadily between 2016 and 2020, although that viewers has (principally) been in a state of decline ever since. In 2022, viewership for MSNBC’s primetime and day-time information audiences dropped, as did its income, whereas viewership for its rightwing competitor community, Fox Information, rose considerably, a research by Pew Research shows. Final yr saw a bump in interest for the channel, although, for the reason that election, viewership is, as soon as once more, down.
None of that is significantly stunning, since community information is a largely dying medium. Deadline writes that whereas information community viewership was up throughout the board this yr as a result of election, community numbers are “nonetheless off from the 2020 cycle, which was a little bit of a increase yr for linear TV typically.”
Musk has bought media platforms earlier than. Whereas it appears extremely unlikely that he would ever get his paws on MSNBC, if he did, it’s straightforward to think about it being a complete catastrophe. So far as might be discerned, Musk hates information networks and journalists. Like Trump, he has taken to calling legacy media networks “pretend information,” and leftwing “propaganda,” and he repeatedly encourages folks to make use of his social media platform, X, in its place supply of “info.” Musk and different conservatives have additionally sought to destroy the status of public information networks, and have brazenly referred to as for them to be defunded.
Since he took over Twitter and rebranded it as X, the social community has seen an advertiser exodus and as of October, it had misplaced 80 percent of its value based on a Constancy investor report. If Musk’s objective is to defund MSNBC, shopping for it is perhaps the quickest route.
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