USA · Bias: Left-leaning
Versant Media Group
For 27 years this network was MSNBC — literally a joint venture between NBC and Microsoft when it launched in 1996 (the name is a portmanteau of MSN and NBC). Microsoft sold its stake in the TV channel back in 2005 and the website in 2012, but the name stuck around for another decade anyway. In November 2025 it finally rebranded as MS NOW, as part of Comcast spinning off its cable networks into a standalone company called Versant Media Group, effective January 2026 — same left-leaning opinion hosts, new logo, new corporate parent. Whatever it's called, it still pulled over 1.1 million primetime viewers in Q1 2026, comfortably ahead of CNN.
By 2017, a year into Donald Trump's first term, this network (then still MSNBC) had found something Fox never expected: an audience. The Rachel Maddow Show, built around deep dives into the daily chaos of the new administration, wasn't just growing — in May 2017 it became the number-one non-sports program on all of cable, and the network briefly overtook both CNN and Fox News in total ratings for the first time in its history. The motive was never a mystery: give anti-Trump viewers a nightly home. It worked, cementing the network's identity for the rest of the decade as the anti-Fox — proof that opinion journalism, done with total conviction in one direction, can be just as commercially lucrative as Fox's version aimed the other way.
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