‘How Much Does It Cost?’

This week, telecom giant Comcast announced plans to divest itself from some of its most well-known media properties. CNBC and MSNBC, as well as other popular cable assets, will be spun off from the conglomerate into a new company tentatively called SpinCo. The move will decisively severe those assets from their longtime home, Comcast’s NBC broadcast network.

It’s not exactly clear what comes next. Comcast has claimed that MSNBC and other spun-off media properties are not up for sale, though that hasn’t stopped rampant speculation about that being the case. In general, it doesn’t seem like a particularly hopeful sign for the brands that are being unloaded. Matt Egan, at CNN, notes that “the spinoff cable channels will have less financial protection from the volatility of the TV industry” now that they have been cut off “from the Comcast mothership and its stable cash flows.”

Never missing an opportunity to insert himself where he’s not welcome, tech billionaire Elon Musk decided to joke about purchasing the 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 can’t be much. Look at the ratings,” Trump Jr. quipped.

Later, podcasting magnate Joe Rogan joined the thread: “If you buy MSNBC, I would like Rachael Maddow’s job. I will wear the same outfit and glasses, and I will tell the same lies.”

MSNBC may find itself in a particularly vulnerable position, given the personal animosity between itself and the incoming President (Donald Trump). Anyone who has even passed across MSNBC over the past decade will know that its viewership basically rises and falls based on how much negative Trump coverage the channel can muster. As the New York Times has put it, while the network “once devoted” itself to “news 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, those within the news organization may find themselves stressing out.

Just why Comcast is spinning off MSNBC at this point is a little unclear. While the channel’s ratings have gone up and down over the years, they haven’t underperformed relative to other peer news channels. MSNBC’s audience size grew steadily between 2016 and 2020, though that audience has (mostly) been in a state of decline ever since. In 2022, viewership for MSNBC’s primetime and day-time news audiences dropped, as did its revenue, while viewership for its rightwing competitor network, Fox News, rose significantly, a study by Pew Research shows. Last year saw a bump in interest for the channel, though, since the election, viewership is, once again, down.

None of this is particularly surprising, since network news is a largely dying medium. Deadline writes that while news network viewership was up across the board this year due to the election, network numbers are “still off from the 2020 cycle, which was a bit of a boom year for linear TV in general.”

Musk has bought media platforms before. While it seems highly unlikely that he would ever get his paws on MSNBC, if he did, it’s easy to imagine it being a total disaster. As far as can be discerned, Musk hates news networks and journalists. Like Trump, he has taken to calling legacy media networks “fake news,” and leftwing “propaganda,” and he regularly encourages people to use his social media platform, X, as an alternative source of “information.” Musk and other conservatives have also sought to destroy the reputation of public news networks, and have openly called for them to be defunded.

Since he took over Twitter and rebranded it as X, the social network has seen an advertiser exodus and as of October, it had lost 80 percent of its value according to a Fidelity investor report. If Musk’s goal is to defund MSNBC, buying it might be the quickest route.