Most of Fox News’ revenue comes from people who don’t watch it regularly. If you subscribe to cable you pay Fox News approximately $2 per month. So cut the cable if you don’t want to subsidize an anti-American foreign controlled operation that screws up its facts and has no interest in informing its audience.
If you want to watch CNN’s livestream, and you don’t want to prop up Fox News, you can subscribe to Sling TV Orange. Other alternatives tend to have Fox News on their list. You can also access CNN Max via HBO Max.
If you want to watch MSNBC’s livestream, you can’t do it with a Peacock internet subscription and you can’t do it directly. You can only do it if you subsidize Fox News in some way AFAICT (via Hulu, Youtube+, etc.). This seems like a really stupid business strategy.
Corrections welcome! I am by no means an expert on this. The incompetence of NBC’s owner, Comcast Corporation, is well established. Rebecca Kutler currently leads MSNBC: she was scooped up from CNN. Does she find easy decisions to be difficult? Was she dropped on her head when she was an infant? Or does she spend her time hand-holding an addled executive suite which runs the whole operation? Comcast’s PE is currently a dismal 5.55 , well-deserved given the somnolence of management.
Brian Roberts took the helm as CEO of Comcast in 2002. His sinecure is secure: he is a billionaire presiding over an operation that tortures its customers and shareholders. News analyst Donald Trump noted in June that MSNBC is run by, “a guy named Brian Roberts, he heads it. He’s a disgrace. He’s a weak, pathetic disgrace”.
Just as an aside, looks like NBC has been taking away Peacock’s functionality along these lines over the last year or so. I recently found out that it no longer allows one to watch the Golf Channel either (I wanted to catch the US Amateur tonight, as a 18 y/o kid named Mason Howell is about to win the title). I need yet ANOTHER service like Hulu, can’t just input my credit card into on the GC site and off I go.
Corporate media is proving itself to be entirely untrustworthy. MSNBC, CNN, and all the networks. The Washington Post, NYT (at least partially), and many more. Remember that they serve their corporate masters more than they serve the truth.
I highly, highly recommend Talking Points Memo, which serves no one but its own mission (its owner is the journalist that started it - Josh Marshall - and its revenue is based almost entirely on subscriptions, not ads), for American political news. It has an openly admitted bias for reality, fact, and truth, which, these days, means liberal/progressive.
I second the recommendation for Talking Points Memo. Their annual fundraising drive ends soon. https://talkingpointsmemo.com/
That said, they have a staff of about 18. About 9% of their revenue comes from advertising. They do original reporting, but methinks you need to support some organization with greater financial heft. Maybe public TV. Maybe ProPublica.
Also, I say gripes about corporate media in general, enshitification, and their dysfunctional business models are topical. Whatever happened to the long tail?
Accurate, barely. The Murdoch family are Australian transplants. There’s an adjacent truth though, articulated by the late Kevin Drum. Outrage sells, Fox News fans it, and no other country would put up with this shit.
The truth is that US institutions mostly operate about as well as they ever have. But Fox pushes outrage over Dr. Fauci and trust in the CDC plummets. They push outrage over Donald Trump’s loss in 2020 and trust in elections plummets. They go all in on CRT and DEI and trust in schools plummets. They push climate denialism and trust in science plummets. They insist that the rest of the news media are liberal pawns and trust in the very institution that explains reality plummets.
Has there ever been an institution like Fox News that works so relentlessly from within to destroy faith in a country by its citizens? It’s a real-life version of what conservatives thought the Communist Party was in the '50s. And we all just let it happen.
I suspect the reason that MSNBC and the Golf Channel aren’t available via the Peacock streaming service is that both (along with CNBC, USA Network, Oxygen, E! and Syfy) are being spun off to form Versant. And, by the way, MSNBC is going to be renamed MS NOW.
MS NOW is a stupid name, what they claim it stands for is even dumber, and the logo looks like clip art from Word 95. I’ll actually be somewhat happy when it fails.
Warner Bros Discovery is also talking about spinning off its cable channels. I think the idea is that in an era of cord cutting, traditional cable channels are perceived as having little value. I even remember reading that Disney was talking about spinning out the ABC television network.
The old complaint was 200 channels and nothing on. Most of those only got carried because the owners managed to force it on carriers as a package deal for something people actually wanted to watch. (Disney is a classic example with ESPN). If carriage fees are down (which I don’t actually know), subscriptions are down, and the channel still costs money to the owner, why keep it as a product?
By way of background, Comcast’s most significant business is as an internet provider according to Bloomberg. How are they doing?
Comcast Corp. is losing customers in its internet access business, with record losses of broadband subscribers for three straight quarters, totaling more than half a million accounts.
Ok, what about their legacy cable business?
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.
So overall:
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.
Ms. Now is being mocked on social media, to the surprise of nobody. I honestly wonder whether the spun off company will remain out of bankruptcy over the next 5 years.
Vox thinks that placating President Trump was part Comcast’s calculations, though the spin-off was in the works before Trump made his oath of office this year.
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