New York Times – December 24, 2005:
Ending a partnership that soured long ago, Microsoft and NBC announced yesterday that they would dissolve their joint ownership of the cable news channel MSNBC, with NBC taking control.
NBC has completed a deal to assume majority control of the channel immediately, with an 82 percent stake, and it will become the sole owner within two years, NBC executives said yesterday. The two companies did not disclose financial terms of the deal.
But the partners will continue their 50-50 ownership of the MSNBC Web site, which, partly as a consequence of its affiliation with Microsoft, is the most-used news site on the Internet.
It appears they are going to keep the “MSNBC” name for now.
“Nobody is talking about things like a name change for the channel right now.”
I remember hearing rumors several years ago that Gates wanted to buy one of the broadcast networks, and partnering with NBC was merely a test. I guess the test failed and he changed his mind.
Lately, in the comparison between CNN and MSNBC, I think the latter is doing a better job of living up to journalistic standards. Not that either is the end all. Hopefully, that’s why many of their ratings are ahead of CNN.
The funniest example the other evening had Chris Matthews doing an A-B comparison of Bush/Cheney/Rumsfeld/Rice/Powell clips of their original lies about why the US needed to invade Iraq vs. their latest lies about never having said those things in the 1st place. This included chuckles over Robert Novak being untouchable, teflon-coated.
Meanwhile, over on CNN at the same time, Wolf Blitzer had Robert Novak on for a spell — riffling through the good ol’ boy routine — discussing nothing more challenging than the weather. Wolf leads all qualifiers for the Marvin Kalb fronting-for-the-spooks award for the 21st Century, anyway.
I was A-B’ing them on both TiVo tuners. Frequently they hit the same topics at similar times. The integrity lag was significant. And I don’t even like Chris Matthews.
I was just waiting for Keith Olberman to log on — give him a head start on the TiVo to skip the commercials — and get an end-of-season chuckle.
Since NBC provided all the news leads and tape, I don’t see M$ departure as anything of significance.
Presumably the femme fatale represents Microsoft?
Is she insecure, high maintenance, difficult?
Does she have bugs?