You’re Fired: Comcast Ditching MSNBC After Trump Victory

It finally happened. The inflection point where podcasts and streaming hosts have become infinitely more powerful than linear cable news television.

There are several factors in play here and they all deserve some attention. First of all, Comcast seems to be getting less tolerant when it comes to the crazy things the various MSNBC hosts say. This was never more obvious than back in July after President-elect Trump was nearly assassinated. The day after, Morning Joe, the MSNBC flagship morning show, was taken off the air so the hosts wouldn’t be tempted to say anything that could be construed as borderline criminal.

Perhaps it would be one thing if MSNBC was a money maker but it’s been a ratings loser for years although did get some bumps during the first Trump term. Even then, it was left-wing hacks like Rachel Maddow constantly teasing the latest “bombshell” over Trump tax returns or the Russia hoax that never panned out to be true.

In short, MSNBC is a dumpster fire of washed-up talent who haven’t yet realized their irrelevance.

When Donald Trump won on November 5, MSNBC ratings were cut in half overnight since viewers were gaslit for months as hosts called Trump a fascist and compared him to Hitler on a near-hourly basis to no avail.

In that context, Comcast has decided that wasting money on cable news is no longer their cup of tea, reports Business Insider:

One of the country’s biggest cable TV companies doesn’t want its cable networks anymore. Would you like them?

That’s the pitch Comcast is making Wednesday as it announces plans to split off almost all its cable TV networks into a new company. It’s the same pitch Comcast floated as a possibility back in October, and most of the details are the same.

Comcast is set to spin off a new publicly traded company, owned by its existing shareholders. Into the spinco goes every cable network Comcast owns except for Bravo. That means networks like CNBC, MSNBC, USA, along with a few digital assets, including its Fandango movie-ticket service.

It plans to hang on to the rest of its media business, including its NBC broadcast network, Peacock streaming service, Universal film and TV studio, and Universal theme-parks business. And Bravo. (Can’t wait for someone smart to explain why Comcast is so attached to Bravo. Maybe it’s as simple as “Real Housewives”?)

To be fair, it’s not just the leftist MSNBC being axed. Comcast would like to sell business news magnet CNBC, along with the USA Network.

Perhaps this recent drop from Pew Research indicating fewer and fewer Americans pay attention to cable news had something to do with it:

• About one-in-five Americans – including a much higher share of adults under 30 (37%) – say they regularly get news from influencers on social media.
• News influencers are most likely to be found on the social media site X, where 85% have a presence. But many also are on other social media sites, such as Instagram (where 50% have an account) and YouTube (44%).
• Slightly more news influencers explicitly identify as Republican, conservative or pro-Donald Trump (27% of news influencers) than Democratic, liberal or pro-Kamala Harris (21%).
  A clear majority of news influencers are men (63%).
• Most (77%) have no affiliation or background with a news organization.

What this basically means is that on average, more and more Americans are getting their news outside the legacy channels owned by corporate media interests. Perhaps the punchline in all this is asking whether anyone really considers MSNBC to be an actual “news channel” anymore or whether they consider it simply to be a left-wing opinion channel. There’s very little hard news left on the network if at all.

The big question is who will buy MSNBC and what will it look like under new ownership?

There is potentially one buyer people on X are hoping for….

Should Elon Musk buy MSNBC?

— Jeff Kuhner (@TheKuhnerReport) November 19, 2024

Renaming it as XNews and filling it with podcast content 24 hours a day would surely bring in more viewers than the MSNBC primetime lineup.