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NBC Purchases MSNBC Rights From Microsoft
flatt writes "Ending a sixteen year partnership between the now Comcast-owned NBCUniversal and Microsoft, the MSNBC.com website has been immediately renamed to NBCNews.com. Both parties note that the integration between both parties is deep and will require 2 years to complete the decoupling. For the immediate future, NBC will continue to provide news content for MSN.com and Microsoft will continue to be the advertising provider for the site. Content control, brand confusion, and partisan content are cited as reasons behind the breakup. Microsoft sold its 50% share in the MSNBC TV rights to NBC back in 2005."
Does that mean that Microsoft didn't like MSNBC's political bias, or that NBC didn't like Microsoft's insertion of political bias on MSNBC.com?
I am a geek attorney, but not your geek attorney unless you've already retained me. This is not legal advice.
It's a bit confusing. There were two MSNBCs: MSNBC the cable channel, and MSNBC the website.
Microsoft divested itself of MSNBC the cable channel in 2005, which is what TFS refers to. MSNBC the cable channel has been owned and operated solely by NBC since then.
MSNBC the website is what today's news is about. Microsoft has sold off their 50% share of MSNBC the website to Comcast/NBC. As a result NBC now has full control over MSNBC the website - content, technology, and (most importantly) advertising.
NBC now owns both MSNBCs. Ultimately in 2013 there will be a single TV/web MSNBC entity just like CNN and FoxNews today. Meanwhile the current MSNBC the website will become NBC's news website.
I think that PBS is every bit as biased as Fox and MSNBC.
What are the equivalencies to Beck, Fox and Friends, Hannity, Maddow, or Olbermann on PBS? PBS is appealing to left leaning upper middle class because the content doesn't cater to political wingnuts like Fox and MSNBC. You're confusing content with bias. When a Fox producer gets caught on the job riling up a crowd at a Tea Party event, Beck promotes "Fox Tea Parties", or FoxNews.com reports the ACA being upheld as affirmation of ObamaTax, that's bias.
Tired of being "punished" by the Slashdot $rtbl since 2002. I'm now over at http://soylentnews.org/ .
I am still waiting for CNNBCBS, a division of ABC. That would be the worst channel ever.
I haven't thought of anything clever to put here, but then again most of you haven't either.
I'd like to take the replies one step further. In the mid 1990s Sun, Oracle, AOL, and others were claiming the death to the PC and all desktop computers would become internet devices. The web or network would become the computer and Microsoft would be irrelevant. In response, Gates realigned the company, refocused on the Internet and released Internet Explorer for free. I believe MSNBC partnership was a service side hedge against what Microsoft saw as a Web assault on their business. NBC, Time Warner, and other television a cable outlets also feared the Web. They was the potential for movie, programming, and music companies to reach consumers directly cutting the media giants out as distributors. I was in the Cable business in 1999 and 2000 and heard this directly from a Time Warner content manager. An NBC / Microsoft offering made sense.
By 2004/2005 the partnership no longer made sense. Time Warner / AOL didn't take over the world and media was shifting to individuals through blogging and a trend towards media streaming. YouTube appeared on the scene in 2005/2006 along with Google Video. The trend towards individual contributions has continued to change the nature of news reporting.
I think the biggest change was the movement of news channels from delivering news to providing news entertainment. IMHO Fox, MSNBC, and CNN are now entertainment assets. This goes beyond the original vision of MSNBC as an Internet news outlet.
it's biased towards "highbrow" which is to appeal to left leaning upper middle class people.
right, because PBS and NPR are trying to promote enriching and beneficial news and entertainment in separate realms. as for the left leaning upper middle class people, i guess they just havent succumbed to the sophistication of nascar and larry the cable guy.
It focuses much more on culture that the masses don't care about (such as opera).
So the acclaimed science program Nova, Inspector Lewis, Downtown Abbey, and Childrens programming like Barney? im sure there are others
Oddly, it's pro investing but mildly anti-business
so a television station that isnt willing to just carte blanche pander for advertising cash and instead gets a chance to truly criticize things like hydraulic fracturing and the pharmaceutical industry has somehow become a bad thing.
I doubt your brother has ever watched PBS (the "listeny" one is called NPR, both under the CPB but separate entities.) flamebait bullshit like "theres a small bit of truth" is the same crap FOX does in order to gin up dissent against anything that goes against the GOP or its inherent interests. it would be better to say "my brother once watched Tavis Smiley form a coherent and well structured argument against the established patterns and processes of social inequality as it applies to race, and that didnt fit with my american dream narrative so now the entire station is some sort of marxist cabal."
Good people go to bed earlier.
I don't think you understand the difference between "bias" in news/reporting and "targeting" in entertainment. ESPN is not "biased" toward a lowbrow audience because focus on ball-sports. That's their entertainment niche. If they reported unfairly toward one team or the next, then that would be bias.
And what does "pro-environmental" mean? That they would like the natural environment to continue to exist?
They're also not anti-business. Never does PBS say anything like, "We should not organize into consolidated sales or service providers to create a streamlined delivery and accounting process." They're against corrupt business. They're bearish investors. They prefer honest and safe investment. But when corrupt business is the means to a new bubble and the myth of perpetual growth, anyone who speaks against such irrational buying will be said to be "anti-business".
They're also not "pro-welfare state", they're pro-healthy-people. Check out the Frontline (I think it was Frontline) episode "Sick Around the World". The reporter goes to different countries finding out how other nations keep their people healthy (Britain, Germany, Japan, Taiwan, etc.). They show faults with all their systems and constantly show contrast with our system which is globally acknowledges to have some of the lowest value of care for the highest cost.
What you may need to acknowledge is that, in balanced investigation and reporting, if some things seem to consistently come out to be favorable, that might not be bias... but reality.