MSNBC’s Comeuppance
The Leftmedia outlet’s parent company has put it up for sale.
Decent humans tune out MSNBC, so who cares that it’s up for sale?
Comcast, the media giant that owns MSNBC and numerous other networks, announced plans yesterday “to create a new publicly traded company comprised of a strong portfolio of NBCUniversal’s cable television networks, including USA Network, CNBC, MSNBC, Oxygen, E!, SYFY and Golf Channel along with complementary digital assets including Fandango and Rotten Tomatoes, GolfNow and Sports Engine, through a tax-free spin-off.” The new company will be called SpinCo, which is pretty much on the nose if you ask me.
Comcast is spinning the announcement as an opportunity to better capitalize on its various brands. According to Fox Business, “SpinCo generated roughly $7 billion in revenue over the last 12 months and Comcast hopes to complete the spinoff project in a year.”
Some of the on-air, er, talent is worried. “I mean, I could be completely wrong,” fretted MSNBC host Joe Scarborough, but “we could all be fired a year from now.” His wife and cohost, Mika Brzezinski, added, “Or tomorrow.”
They did, after all, commit the unconscionable sin of — gasp — talking to Donald Trump Adolf Hitler after the election.
I’m not going to get into the weeds of who’s going to lead which company or what talent may or may not get fired or quit. That is, frankly, all window dressing anyway. The new boss will be the same as the old boss. The on-air personalities will still be left-wing wackos who come in and out of Democrat administrations. Even if salaries or personalities get cut, MSNBC is not suddenly going to become conservative or even just straight news.
I’m also not going to join the schadenfreude of conservatives who are delighted to see MSNBC’s ratings collapse to the lowest level in 25 years after their darling Kamala Harris lost to the Bad Orange Man. (Al Sharpton got his $500,000 from the Harris campaign, so he’s not worried.) Don’t get me wrong — it’s fun to see a lying, race-baiting, sex cult-adoring network flailing. Failure couldn’t happen to a more deserving bunch. But it’s also not exactly failure.
At the risk of playing Debbie Downer, I feel obliged to point out that the Leftmedia is still dominant. Our Thomas Gallatin put it in perspective almost three years ago: “This may be all good news for conservatives, but the trouble is that when it comes to mainstream media and Leftmedia versus Right-leaning news outlets, those on the Left are still accumulating the lion’s share of Americans’ overall attention. And this for the simple fact that there are many more well-established Leftmedia news outlets than there are conservative ones.”
There’s also Big Tech, which Gallatin noted “actively favors Leftmedia news sources over and against conservative ones.” Go ahead, Google a news topic and see if even Fox News comes up on the first page.
The good news, however, is yet another tidbit Gallatin wrote about just yesterday — the growing power of new media like podcasters and other social media influencers who are free of the left-wing corporate legacy media.
We in our humble shop feel an affinity for these folks since that’s how we began in 1996. When Mark Alexander launched The Federalist, now The Patriot Post, there wasn’t much in the way of alternative media yet. Fox News started that same year, and Rush Limbaugh was the only other big game in town.
Make no mistake: The Leftmedia outlets who lie, deceive, and divide our nation on behalf of the Democrat Party stand opposed to Liberty. NBCUniversal selling MSNBC won’t change that.
