MSNBSeeYa!

When MSNBC launched in 1996, the last year a presidential-election day fell on my birthday before this year, comedians and conservative pundits laughed at the number of initials in its name, but the cable-news channel was named with a purpose.  The name was a portmanteau of the Microsoft Network (MSN) and the National Broadcasting Company (NBC) that symbolized how the channel was a joint venture between the two entities.  MSNBC has long since lost its connection to Microsoft; now it's about to lose its ties to NBC News.

Comcast announced that MSNBC, along with CNBC, USA, Oxygen, E!, SYFY and the Golf Channel, will be launched into a separate company.  I was going to say that spinning off CNBC - which ostensibly stands for "Consumer News and Business Channel" - and MSNBC is like "The Jeffersons" being spun off "All In the Family," but that would be misleading, because at least those two sitcoms had Norman Lear in common as their creator.  And, they both aired on the same network.  This spinoff is nothing like that.  The new cable company will be completely divorced from NBC News, and therefore the reporting end of the channel will no longer be available to the commentariat end.  Comcast is keeping the parent NBC network and its news department.  Cable channels simply don't make money for media conglomerates anymore; streaming is the wave of the future.

I've been listening to numerous podcasts since the election, and there seems to be a sense of schadenfreude over MSNBC's sudden collapse in the ratings, and not just because of the Joe-and-Mika debacle.  The network built up this narrative that Donald Trump was a mere aberration from the ongoing evolution of American politics and that certain demographics - white women, Hispanic men, politically centrist suburbanites, anti-Trump Republicans (the only anti-Trump Republicans, it turns out, were MSNBC guests) - would hold Trump accountable in the 2024 election and that Kamala Harris would prevail.  I myself realized on the morning after the election that this was certainly not the case, and thanks to these podcasters and Comcast's business decision, I have to concede that what MSNBC reported was not reality but the network's interpretation of it - an interpretation as wrong as the parallel universe MAGA Republicans inhabit.   

MSNBC has largely fallen into disarray because it has relied primarily on getting access to the Washington Democratic establishment that saw things the way it wanted to, not as they actually were.  The information its on-air personalities have gotten from establishment Democrats turned out to be based on wishful thinking more than facts on the ground.  In the end, that access is all that mattered, and the alliance between MSNBC and the Democratic National Committee may very well have been the reason both were out of touch with what was going on on the ground with regard to the presidential election in places like, well, all seven swing states.

The conventional wisdom among liberal podcasters is that MSNBC has so long been the television arm of corporate centrist Democrats that those same Democrats, working in tandem with MSNBC's movers and shakers, sabotaged both of Bernie Sanders' presidential campaigns in order to directly help Hillary Clinton in 2016 and Joe Biden in 2020.  It's more complicated than that, and this theory dismisses President Biden's progressive accomplishments (building infrastructure, lowering the price of insulin, the CHIPS Act, allowing Medicare to negotiate drug prices with Big Pharma) as well as his own alliance with Sanders.  Given how many MSNBC insiders have framed the trajectory of politics, though, it's easy to see how the channel's narrative favored the mainstream Democratic perspective of the issues and the 2024 presidential campaign, presenting on-camera hosts and guests that agreed with each other without getting the perspective of the average voter.

"We were so [into] Harris propaganda that when she lost, viewers were shocked," an anonymous on-air pundit told  The Daily Beast. "It turned into one giant circle j--k and echo chamber. If MSNBC wants to be of service to its viewers, they can’t keep them in fantasy land."

Now that Trump has won and we see MSNBC hosts bowing to him to stay relevant, it's hard to see how MSNBC itself can stay relevant.  Folks like Nicolle Wallace and Lawrence O'Donnell will continue to call Trump out for his lies and his cruelty, but how much good can they do when the channel will be completely untethered from NBC News and the channel's ratings are already in the toilet thanks to viewers realizing that the idea of President Harris was all a mirage?  MSNBC was pretty much the only network that called Trump out during the 2024 campaign while other networks were "sane-washing" Trump's craziness, but who cares when all that matters now is to tread lightly going forward when Trump is once again going to be in charge?  

MSNBC made lots of money for its parent company delivering hopeful commentary (reporting? No one watches cable news for actual reporting) in the fight for democracy and against Trumpism, but now MSNBC and other Big Media outlets have turned out to be like the Wizard of Oz - look behind the curtain, and you realize that there's nothing there.  Comcast is happy to let go of MSNBC and stop spending so much money for its diminishing returns.  When MSNBC - and CNBC, which is less about consumer news and more of a business channel - re-emerge as subsidiaries of a different company, they will most likely have different names, thanks to their divorce from NBC News.  But they will both likely share the same fate.

Oblivion.

And rather than wait for MSNBC's spinoff and inevitable demise, I might just stop watching it much sooner.  After trying to watch less news earlier in the year, I started watching more of MSNBC over the summer and early fall to keep up with the election campaign.  After months of being told that Trump was doomed and that black was white and up was down, I'm ready to declare myself over and out.  Time to go back to the BBC.