Wednesday Morning Rant

Nothing makes journalists happier than when the news is itself news. Well, that's usually true, but sometimes when the news is the news, it isn't because of "firefighter" journalists speaking "truth to power" or whatever, but because of major industrial shakeup.

Comcast made news this week for firing the execrable Joy Reid, but this is possibly - perhaps even likely - related to the slightly older piece of news that Comcast will be spinning off much of its cable TV portfolio into a new independent subsidiary that will immediately IPO and trade on its own. They haven't bothered to give it a name yet, calling it just "SpinCo." That may be an apt name, because the new corporation will contain NBC News' intellectual weak sister CNBC and that weak sister's inbred idiot cousin, MSNBC - though not NBC News itself.

This spinoff - whatever firings happen to set the stage for it and limit liability - might actually be an important development because there is no way these networks are profitable with their tiny audiences. It has long been obvious that these networks are financial sinkholes and there is no way the books can be balancing. The recently-fired Joy Reid's show was pulling in barely more than 80,000 people in the 25-54 demo. You can't swing a cat without hitting YouTubers that pull bigger audiences.

But that's just a weak host on the #2 network. What about the big dogs? The best-performing show on cable news is Fox News' "The Five" and it pulls in a mediocre half million or so viewers in the demo. Sure, that's 6.3x more than Joy Reid got, but it's still only half a million people in the group that actually buys things. Fox News dominates its competitors in both total audience and the lucrative 25-54 group. It sweeps the top 10 in both the demo and total audience, and its biggest show pulls in fewer than five million total viewers.

The terrestrial, non-cable news networks still have surprisingly small viewership, but it is much larger than cable. ABC News is on top for the nightly newscast, and it pulls 1.3 million in the key demographic - more than twice as much as the best show on cable news. Except possibly Fox, the cable news nets cannot be profitable, so how are they in business?

In short: subsidies. Probably not government subsidies (at least, not now that USAID has been shuttered and DOGE is stalking the corridors of Washington with a machete) so much as corporate subsidies. The very thing that leftists always decried - corporate entanglement and ownership of news outlets - is the only thing keeping it alive. ABC is owned by Disney. NBC and its sisters are owned by Comcast (until SpinCo happens and the cable side becomes nominally independent). CBS is owned by Paramount, which is the artist formerly known as Viacom (and soon, Skydance). CNN is owned by Warner Bros-Discovery. Fox, the odd man out, is owned by Fox.

Like loser sons with trust funds pinch-hitting for competence, these loser enterprises are kept alive by their rich parents. They're products of vanity and political expedience, with cash shoveled in from the diversified parent corporations. Disney and Comcast are particularly diverse, with one being primarily a sports, cruise, theme park and merchandise company and the other being primarily a communications company.

But what happens if those loser sons are no longer worth it? They not only have failed to deliver their political goals, they have gone so insane that they're now putting their parents in the crosshairs and threatening the parents' operations. We may find out, at least for the weaklings of the NBC family. As part of a pure media company and without Comcast's deep pockets, how much appetite will there be to keep shoveling a now much smaller pile of cash into MSNBC and CNBC? How long will the minority shareholders of the yet-to-be-named SpinCo be willing to accept worthless and now counterproductive cable news networks hoovering up cash from profitable sports and entertainment divisions?

Time will tell, of course, but the winds of change appear to be blowing. Comcast is dropping its cable portfolio, Shari Redstone is not willing to defend CBS over her own personal bottom line and CNN is already turning into a zombie under Warner Bros-Discovery. Are we finally at the beginning of the end for cash-sucking propagandists?

I don't know - but I do know that nobody likes indefinitely paying people who can't get the job done, especially if cash is getting tight. Then again, cable news has already long outlived its usefulness, so who knows.

posted by Joe Mannix at 11:00 AM

| Access Comments