MSNBC

MSNBC — Breaking News, Top Stories, & Show Clips

MSNBC is an American cable television channel that provides NBC News coverage as well as its own reporting and political commentary on current events. MSNBC is owned by the NBCUniversal News Group, a unit of the NBCUniversal Broadcast, Cable, Sports and News division of NBCUniversal (all of which are ultimately owned by Comcast).

MSNBC and its website were founded in 1996 under a partnership between Microsoft and General Electric’s NBC unit, hence the network’s naming.[3] Although they had the same name, msnbc.com and MSNBC maintained separate corporate structures and news operations. msnbc.com was headquartered on the Microsoft campus in Redmond, Washington, while MSNBC operated out of NBC’s headquarters in New York City. Microsoft divested itself of its stakes in the MSNBC channel in 2005 and in msnbc.com in July 2012. The general news site was rebranded as NBCNews.com, and a new msnbc.com was created as the online home of the cable channel.

In the late summer of 2015, MSNBC revamped its programming; the moves were in sharp contrast to previous programming decisions at the network. MSNBC sought to sharpen its news image by entering into a dual editorial relationship with its organizational parent NBC News. MSNBC Live, the network’s flagship daytime news platform, was expanded to cover over eight hours of the day.[5] Phil Griffin is the president and director of day-to-day operations at MSNBC.

As of September 2018, approximately 87 million households in the United States (90.7 percent of pay television subscribers) were receiving MSNBC.[7] In 2019, MSNBC ranked second among basic cable networks averaging 1.8 million viewers, behind rival Fox News.