MSNBC

MSNBC (short for Microsoft NBC)^[1][2] is an American news-based television channel and website headquartered in New York City. It is owned by NBCUniversal — a subsidiary of Comcast — and provides news coverage and political commentary. The network produces live broadcasts for its channel from studios at 30 Rockefeller Plaza in Manhattan, New York City, and aggregates its coverage and commentary on its website, msnbc.com.

As of September 2018, approximately 87 million households in the United States (90.7 percent of pay television subscribers) were receiving MSNBC.

In the third quarter of 2023, MSNBC was the second most-watched cable news network in the U.S., averaging 792,000 total day viewers, behind rival Fox News, which averaged 1.07 million viewers, and ahead of CNN, which averaged 457,000 viewers.^[3] In 2023, one of MSNBC’s most watched shows, The Beat with Ari Melber, averaged 1.8 million viewers.^[4] As of November 2023, MSNBC’s top five highest-rated shows were The Rachel Maddow Show, The Last Word with Lawrence O’Donnell, Deadline: White House, The Beat with Ari Melber, and All In with Chris Hayes.^[5][6][7][8]

MSNBC and its website were founded in 1996 under a partnership between Microsoft and General Electric‘s NBC unit, hence the network’s naming.^[2][1] Microsoft divested itself of its stakes in the MSNBC channel in 2005 and its stakes 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.^[9] In the late summer of 2015, MSNBC revamped its programming by entering into a dual editorial relationship with its organizational parent NBC News.