Elon Musk, Hungary, and the future of MSNBC | Will Bunch Newsletter

All good things must come to ... a brief pause. Now that the election is finally over (and, remarkably, no one is challenging the result or anything), it’s time to reckon with the fact that I’ve earned old-man-quantity vacation time and have used hardly any of it in this wild year of 2024. Therefore, I shall be officially off between now and mid-December, and there will be no Will Bunch Newsletter for the next two Tuesdays. Happy Thanksgiving to all!

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Imagine there’s no liberal-leaning cable TV news network. With apologies to the late great John Lennon, it’s easy if you try. A lot of us are old enough to remember what the world was like in 2003, when bad people in the White House were lying to the American public — this time about invading an oil-rich country on the other side of the world — and the vast wasteland of cable news was populated by men wearing flags on their lapels, cowed into post-9/11 groupthink.

The tone for elite Beltway journalism seemed to follow the lead of Bush 43 White House press secretary Ari Fleischer, who’d warned in the days following the 2001 terror attacks that Americans “need to watch what they do, watch what they say.” The folks who saw the massive holes in the case for war with Iraq tended to write for smaller sites, including the strange new world known as “blogs.” When cable network MSNBC, struggling with bad ratings and lack of any clear brand, went out on a limb and hired the popular but left-leaning Phil Donahue in 2002, he lasted just eight months, as a leaked memo from NBC News — then owned by General Electric, a large defense contractor — said that liberal Donahue would be a “difficult public face for NBC in a time of war.”

Just two decades later, could another nuclear-level freeze for left-of-center views on conventional TV be just over the horizon? The odds spiked when — coincidentally or not, less than two weeks after the reelection of an authoritarian-minded Donald Trump — Philadelphia-based Comcast announced that the now-liberal-in-prime-time MSNBC and other cable channels have been spun into a separate company with the prosaic name of SpinCo, a move that’s typically the prelude to a merger or a sale.

A lot can and will happen in the months ahead, but the possibility of a new MSNBC owner will be something of a cloud over the future some of Trump’s highest-profile media critics — like Rachel Maddow, Joy Reid, and Chris Hayes — in a time of wider fears over just how aggressively the mainstream media is planning to cover a president with an autocratic streak and a lineup of off-the-wall cabinet nominees, hellbent on reversing normal governing.

“Comcast wants to get out of the cable based business, or at minimum give itself the option to get out of the cable based business,” Keith Olbermann, whose anti-Bush 43 administration commentaries on MSNBC in the mid-2000s pushed the network toward the left (and an old friend, as we went to high school together in the mid-1970s), speculated Monday on his popular podcast. He voiced his fear that the buyer could be the Trump-aligned billionaire, Elon Musk. After all, Musk spent a whopping $44 billion to buy the social-media site Twitter and turn it into X, a cesspool for right-wing disinformation that the world’s richest person often then retweets.

This comes at a remarkably fraught moment for the mainstream press, with far too many signs that leaders of a fearful media are engaging in what critics call “anticipatory obedience” of not wishing to trigger Trump’s wrath in advance. Most notably, the billionaire owners of both the Washington Post and the Los Angeles Times spiked their staffs’ endorsements of Trump election foe Kamala Harris, then tweeted congratulations to the incoming POTUS, or praise for his wackadoodle cabinet picks.

And yet the prominence of this “obey in advance” crowd hasn’t silenced talk from key players in Team Trump, including the president-elect, that the new administration is willing to abuse its vast regulatory powers to punish its critics in the press. “Broadcast licenses are not sacred cows,” tweeted conservative Federal Communications Commission member Brendan Carr, tapped by Trump to chair the FCC in 2025, who later told Fox Business that he wants to look at radio licenses loosely tied to the liberal billionaire George Soros.

Which brings us back to the curious case of MSNBC. Like other mainstream outlets, including rival CNN, MSNBC has seen its ratings plummet since Trump’s Nov. 5 victory, in part because of liberal viewers who say they’ve lost their appetite for news, at least for now. It didn’t help matters when the hosts of MSNBC’s once-popular Morning Joe, the married couple Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski, shocked viewers by revealing that after months of harsh Trump criticism, they’d met with the president-elect at Mar-a-Lago to reopen lines of communication.

Were the two motivated by fear of personal retribution, as reported by media critic Brian Stelter? Did their bosses back in New York and Philadelphia know about the get-together, just days ahead of the MSNBC spinoff announcement?

Meanwhile, historians and other academics who study authoritarian regimes say the pattern of bullying or possibly buying a more compliant news media is something they’ve seen elsewhere — especially in Viktor Orbán’s Hungary, which seems to be a model for Trump’s MAGA movement.

Critics say Orbán and the wealthy oligarchs who support him have used a blend of tactics to dominate the political conversation and limit citizen exposure to any opposition viewpoints. That’s included a businessman with close ties to Orbán buying the Eastern European nation’s oldest newspaper in 2016 — in order to close it. A network of foundations also created a nationwide right-wing network of news outlets, while opposition voices have struggled with government harassment.

Orbán’s rivals haven’t been totally silenced on social media, but their voices have been overwhelmed. Reporters Without Borders estimates pro-Orbán oligarchs control 80% of Hungary’s media, totally blurring the lines between news and propaganda. The main opposition leader said, “This parallel reality is like The Truman Show.”

Here at home, this is where our most prominent pro-government oligarch in Musk enters the picture. The news that MSNBC could be available as result of the Comcast spinoff immediately sparked online pleas for the electric-car magnate to buy the network and move its political orientation to the right — exactly what he’d done over two years in converting Twitter into X. “How much is it?” Musk asked in response to a tweet. He may have been joking. Or not.

There are multiple reality checks. Stelter, in a piece for CNN, explores the Musk chatter and notes that Comcast harbors hopes that it can operate SpinCo — which includes a half-dozen other channels like business network CNBC — at a profit for itself, that any sale would take at least a year and probably longer, and if MSNBC were for sale, some liberal-leaning billionaires would probably be interested. Perhaps, but I have to wonder if some staffers aren’t polishing up their 2002 flag lapels. Stay tuned.

Question: [What is the] cause of Harris’ fewer votes than Biden? Voter suppression or disenfranchisement? Voter attitude change on own? Social media influence? — pfbh.bsky.social via Bluesky

Answer: It’s going to take months to get the full picture of why and how Donald Trump won his narrow plurality over Kamala Harris, but this part stands out. Trump received at least 3 million more votes (77 million, and counting) than when he ran as an incumbent in 2020, while Harris (74 million, and counting) received a lot fewer votes than Biden did last time around — roughly 7 million less. The Inquirer, in looking at Philadelphia voter patterns, found similar trends and particularly a drop in predominantly Black neighborhoods for Harris. During the campaign, I argued that Team Harris was focused too hard on wooing Republicans with Liz Cheney, and not doing enough to excite turnout from the Democrats’ more liberal base. These are early hints that this is what happened.

A lot of great responses to last week’s question about the future of the Democratic Party. Not surprisingly, there was disagreement: A few of you wished the party had run a Bernie Sanders-style populist campaign in 2024, but others blamed too much progressive influence for Kamala Harris’ defeat. The most common threads were better communication with working-class voters and a more forceful denunciation of Donald Trump and his first-term record. “Democrats need strong ‘spicey’ leadership to stand up to the bully party,” wrote Lisa Bensel. “We’re all too nice, too empathetic, too kumbaya. Strong, but ethical and moral.” Michael Vario wrote the party “needs to get back to where it was before the neoliberal, third-way ‘New Democrats’ hijacked the Party in the ‘80s. You know, when their base was the working class, not the donor class.”

📮 This week’s question: In a troubled time for America, what are you thankful for this Thanksgiving? Please email me your answer and put “Thanksgiving thanks” in the subject line.

The revolution that created the modern U.S. way of college — starting with the 1944 G.I. Bill, which showed that higher education could become the American Dream for middle-class young people — wasn’t only about the massive surge in campus enrollment in the post-war era. It was also the radical idea of a liberal education — that college was a place that celebrated critical thinking and a diverse course load in the arts and the social sciences, for finding not only a career but a philosophy of life. Thus, the surge in the study of sociology, which applies social science to understanding the ways people organize themselves, such as class, religion, or gender. From 1950 to the peak in 1972, the number of sociology majors rose 350%, to 4% of all diplomas. “It was the ‘thing to do,’” an NYU emeritus professor wrote in a recent essay, “if someone was interested in radical reform, or even revolution.”

It’s no wonder, then, that in the 2020s sociology finds itself on the cutting edge of a new push by the far right to end what it calls “liberal indoctrination” on college campuses by eliminating courses and even entire disciplines at public universities, under an openly political agenda. The leading edge of this counter-revolution has been Florida under Gov. Ron DeSantis, where Commissioner of Higher Education Manny Diaz Jr., an ally of the governor, recently removed Principles of Sociology as part of the core curriculum for public university students. He said that sociology has been “hijacked by left-wing activists.”

Now the New York Times is reporting that trustees at schools such as Florida International University are deemphasizing an even broader range of social-science courses that were once part of its core curriculum — part of a broader campaign in red states to undercut or even ban classes they view as hotbeds of liberal thought. The paper noted that the conservative push to attack course offerings comes after an initial wave of reforms that served as a kind of a backlash to 2020’s George Floyd racial protest marches — often limits on what professors as well as K-12 teachers could say about hot-button issues such as race or LGBTQ rights — faltered in the courts. It’s also a much more dangerous assault on academic freedom than the examples of “cancel culture” held aloft by the right. “That’s how indoctrination happens,” Tania Cepero López, an FIU faculty union leader whose family fled repression in Cuba, said of the political meddling. “That’s how censorship happens.”

It shows how America’s college campuses are only going to heat up as a political battleground in the looming Trump era. Much like the concerns about the future of the American media (see above), it’s an echo of the authoritarian crackdown in Viktor Orbán’s Hungary, where the government and its right-wing allies have taken over major universities or banned academic fields such as gender studies under a playbook that’s been praised by the likes of vice president-elect JD Vance. But undoing the college revolution of the 1950s and ‘60s raises an even broader question: Why do today’s Republicans hate liberal education, and the concept of critical thinking?

Nov. 26 is often on or about the Thanksgiving holiday, so ... slim pickings. But in 2013 I was clearly taking great joy in the coming downfall of my political bete noir from the first half of that wild decade: Pennsylvania Gov. Tom Corbett. Why, with a Nixon-Watergate-level approval rate of just 24%, was this Republican about to become the only one-term governor in modern state history? I cited “the alleged mishandling of the Jerry Sandusky case when he was attorney general, the failure of almost all of his legislative agenda, the Tea Party pandering, the cruel cuts to education and social-welfare programs even as billionaire frackers got favorable tax treatment, and the state’s decline from one of the highest rates of job growth in the nation to one of the worst.” Wow. Read the rest: “He is now the most unpopular governor ...”

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