Short answer: NBC News is owned by NBCUniversal, which is owned by Comcast Corporation — the cable-and-broadband giant run by the Roberts family. Comcast is publicly traded, but a special class of super-voting stock hands CEO Brian Roberts roughly a third of the shareholder vote, so in practice one family sits at the top of the company that owns NBC News. If you have heard NBC called a liberal network, most of that reputation was really about MSNBC — and as of 2026, MSNBC is not even part of the same company anymore. * Start with the split, because it is the thing almost everyone gets wrong. On January 5, 2026, Comcast completed the spinoff of a new, separately traded company called Versant Media Group (Nasdaq: VSNT), led by former NBCUniversal executive Mark Lazarus (CNBC; Variety, 2025-26). Versant took Comcast's cable channels — CNBC, USA Network, and the network formerly known as MSNBC. NBC News was NOT included. The broadcast news division that feeds NBC Nightly News, the Today show, Meet the Press and NBCNews.com stayed with NBCUniversal and Comcast. * MSNBC itself changed identity in the process. On November 15, 2025, it rebranded as "MS NOW" — officially "My Source for News, Opinion and the World" — and physically moved out of 30 Rockefeller Plaza (The Hill; Hollywood Reporter, 2025). So the opinion channel that built the "liberal NBC" reputation now has a different name, a different building, and a different corporate owner (Versant) than NBC News. When someone points at prime-time MS NOW commentary to prove NBC News is biased, they are pointing at a company Comcast no longer controls. * Then it got bigger. On June 29, 2026, Comcast announced it will spin off ALL of NBCUniversal — plus the British broadcaster Sky — into its own separate publicly traded company, targeting completion around mid-2027 (Washington Post; CNBC, 2026-06-29). Universal Pictures, the NBC and Telemundo broadcast networks, Peacock, Bravo and NBC News would move together into that new entity, leaving Comcast as mainly a cable and broadband business. In other words, the corporate home of NBC News is scheduled to change twice inside about eighteen months — a reminder that "who owns this outlet" is a moving target, not a fixed fact. * Is NBC News liberal or conservative? The honest answer is that its newsroom is far less unified than partisans on either side assume — and the clearest proof is a self-inflicted 2024 crisis. In March 2024, NBC News hired former Republican National Committee chair Ronna McDaniel as a paid political contributor, just weeks after she left the RNC. The reaction inside the building was open revolt: Chuck Todd criticized management on air, Rachel Maddow called the decision "inexplicable," and other anchors publicly objected (NPR; Deadline, March 2024). Within days, NBCUniversal News Group chairman Cesar Conde reversed course and dropped her. A network trying to plant a conservative voice, and its own liberal-leaning stars forcing it back out, is not the behavior of a tidy ideological monolith. * So treat NBC News the way its ownership actually reads: a mainstream broadcast news division inside a family-influenced media conglomerate that is in the middle of reshuffling itself into new companies, with an opinion sibling that has already left the family and taken the loudest political voices with it. On our least-biased-news ranking we grade outlets by who owns them and how openly they own it — and the useful move here is to stop treating "NBC" as one blob. NBC News, MS NOW, and CNBC now answer to different owners. Know which one you are actually watching before you decide who is spinning you.