Last week we pointed out how NBC‘s “The Tonight Show” embarrassingly needed the guest appearance of Fox News‘s Greg Gutfeld, a rival/competitor, to inject some ratings life into the graveyard of late night variety programs. The show highlighted the decline of the television network and its cable counterparts (including CNBC, MSNBC, USA) under parent corporation Comcast, and the management by Chairman/CEO Brian Roberts (pictured above), especially compared to Fox Corporation’s successes.
It has been known for several months that Comcast will spin off all its television properties except for NBC and Bravo, into their own separate company, which will be called Versant. For a while many observers wondered whether the “NBC” identity, and the iconic peacock logo, would travel to the new publicly traded company and remain attached to their former cable brethren. The answer — at least pertaining to badly tarnished and desperately leftist MSNBC — came today, and the answer is “no.” Per CNBC:
MSNBC will change its name later this year and drop the storied peacock image from its branding — the first real public-facing changes in Versant’s upcoming separation from Comcast’s NBCUniversal.
The political news network will be renamed My Source News Opinion World, or MS Now, Versant Chief Executive Officer Mark Lazarus wrote in an internal memo to employees that was seen by CNBC.
In January, Lazarus told a group of MSNBC staffers that the network wouldn’t change its name. But during the past few months of transition planning, NBCUniversal leaders decided MSNBC should take on a new name “to accelerate the distinction between the MSNBC and NBC News organizations,” Lazarus wrote in the memo Monday.
MSNBC’s president, Rebecca Kutler, let it be known that NBCUniversal gave her venomous anti-Trump network the boot and that it is no longer allowed to use NBC News’s people:
MSNBC has been undergoing aggressive hiring for about 100 new positions to stand up its own newsroom independent from NBC News. The network has already hired about 40 journalists from CNN, Bloomberg, Politico and other news organizations to establish its first-ever Washington, D.C., bureau.
“During this time of transition, NBCUniversal decided that our brand requires a new, separate identity,” Kutler wrote. “This decision now allows us to set our own course and assert our independence as we continue to build our own modern newsgathering operation.”
Also, the peacock logo is a no-go for the new “MS Now,” nor will it be used by all the other networks that Versant will control. And CNBC wants you to know that while it will keep its name, separating from NBC is perfectly natural:
…CNBC’s news organization is already separate enough from NBC News that executives decided it didn’t need a name change. Also, technically, the “NBC” in “CNBC” never stemmed from National Broadcasting Co. Rather, CNBC stands for “Consumer News and Business Channel.”
Yeah, we all knew that — right?
As we mentioned last week, the quality destruction of NBC and its related properties came under the management of Brian Roberts. NLPC presented a shareholder proposal at Comcast’s annual meeting in June that called for him to have to relinquish one of his roles — either Chairman or CEO — and we circulated a memorandum to shareholders that highlighted his failures in overseeing the company’s broadcast properties, among other things:
NBC is the first and oldest major U.S. broadcast network, with a storied history of popular, long-lasting programs (like “Today,” “The Tonight Show,” and “Saturday Night Live”) and a once reputable news division. While the latter already projected a politically leftward drift, under Mr. Roberts’s oversight, NBC News and cable news network MSNBC went off the rails.
Specific examples of reporting bias, poor news judgment, journalistic falsehoods and agenda-driven coverage are too numerous to list, but suffice to say the last 10 years – to broadly characterize NBC’s and MSNBC’s output – have been dominated by what is broadly known today as “Trump Derangement Syndrome” (“TDS”). Two among the widespread, false narratives that arose over that period of time that were either generated and/or amplified by Comcast’s subsidiaries were the Russia collusion hoax, and the “hide (Joe) Biden’s decline” hoax. NBC’s and MSNBC’s TDS obsessions – along with those of other progressive mouthpieces disguised as journalism at ABC, CBS and CNN – drove their viewing public to all-time levels of distrust, and partly contributed to the return of President Trump to the White House for a second term. Viewership has only worsened since the 2024 election outcome.
The atrocious conduct of the corporate-owned U.S. media has led to the lowest levels of trust by Americans in five decades. Confidence in the news has fallen more than nearly every other U.S. institution measured by Gallup, with Congress the only one ranking below the media. Television journalists rank lower than even their print counterparts.
For this, Mr. Roberts bears a huge portion of the responsibility. His weak leadership can’t even demand that his best-known, most popular MSNBC personality, Rachel Maddow, to show up for work more than one day a week, despite her $25 million annual salary. The network provided a soft landing in an anchor seat for disgraced liar Brian Williams, who deserved termination. And NBC could not bear to allow a congressman’s 30-second ad during the 2022 Winter Olympics in China that criticized sponsors of the so-called “Genocide Games,” with Comcast obviously not wanting to upset its business partners. And earlier this year NBCUniversal settled a defamation lawsuit brought by a doctor, who originally sued for $30 million, after NBC and MSNBC personalities repeatedly accused him of performing “mass hysterectomies” at an ICE facility in Georgia.
MSNBC and many other of Comcast’s cable television networks have been so devalued under Mr. Roberts’s stewardship that the Board has decided to spin them off into another separate, publicly-traded company. Because NBC can still generate profitability from sports broadcast rights, and Bravo still holds some value due to programming quality that can be monetized, they will remain under Comcast’s control. However, it remains to be seen how the divestiture of MSNBC and CNBC from standard-bearer NBC, Peacock streaming and parent Comcast – all five of which enjoy the identity of the iconic rainbow-peacock logo – will retain viability.
“MS Now” hardly seems like a rebranding that will inspire ongoing loyalty to a network dominated by rabid far-left screeds.
Meanwhile, the TV networks aren’t Roberts’s only revenue-generating problem, as Bloomberg reported today in a story that emphasizes Comcast’s broadband subscriber losses:
The Philadelphia-based telecom and media conglomerate has reported record losses of broadband subscribers for three straight quarters, more than half a million accounts in total, after pandemic-related federal subsidies for low-income customers ended and telecom companies like T-Mobile US Inc. got much more aggressive offering consumers alternative options.
The mega-sized wireless carriers — AT&T, Verizon and T-Mobile — have greatly expanded their 5G networks to serve stationary homes and businesses, creating another competition headache for the likes of Comcast’s Xfinity and other providers. More from Bloomberg:
For years the company founded by Roberts’ father with the purchase of a single pay-TV franchise in Tupelo, Mississippi, was the king of cable. But as consumers have canceled those pricey TV packages in favor of streaming services like Netflix Inc., Comcast’s video business has shriveled. At 11.8 million, the company’s cable-TV customers amount to fewer than half their peak in 2008. With that business shrinking, Comcast no longer has the easy sell of asking a cable customer to sign up for internet access too.
“Pay TV cord-cutting was really the catalyst that started impacting broadband because you’re no longer in a bundle,” said streaming media consultant Dan Rayburn. “And the value was always in the bundle.” …
While the company works on its broadband problem, sales are forecast to be little changed this year and rise 3% in 2026. Unless there’s a turnaround, 2025 will go down as the fourth losing year for Comcast shares in the past five — with the stock down about 11% year to date, compared with an 10% gain for the S&P 500 Index.
The dismal results go back much further than that, as NLPC pointed out in its shareholder memo. For example, Comcast’s stock has underperformed the S&P 500 by more than 134% over the past ten years.
As heir to the family business, Roberts controls about 33 percent of the voting share rights while maintaining only one percent equity, thanks to special class shares that he owns. He has no accountability on the board of directors, with only yes-man Edward Breen serving as Lead Independent Director. He’s got a nice new theme park in Orlando he’s added to the Universal portfolio, and there’s an occasional theatrical hit that emerges from the movie studios, but otherwise his tenure has been marked by mediocrity.
Now he’ll have to fill his Peacock streaming platform with fresh content, besides the sports broadcasting rights that NBC has acquired — mainly the NFL and NBA. He’ll probably cut deals to share content and bundle services with others, but none of that will make Peacock stand out. Innovation, creativity and foresight are needed, and Roberts has already shown he doesn’t have much of any of those qualities.
