A slick new civil rights-themed video promoting MSNBC’s forced name change to “MS NOW” features paid black actors playing ordinary Americans, intercut with pensive shots of MSNBC’s white primetime stars. The promotional spot, narrated by Rachel Maddow reading the Constitution, appears to be a ham-handed effort by MSNBC’s new parent company, Versant, to cater to MSNBC’s large black audience—the largest in cable news—when its primetime and morning anchor lineup is overwhelmingly white.
The ad is part of what the New York Times reports is a $20 million marketing campaign to create brand awareness for MS NOW. It uses archival protest footage, video of Martin Luther King Jr., and Maddow’s patriotic narration to portray MS NOW as a beacon of racial and social justice. It also extensively uses black actors without identifying them as paid performers, a Washington Free Beacon review found. The actors, Alex Mason, Shekaya Sky McCarthy, and Marcel Noel, stare off into the distance as Maddow speaks of forming “a more perfect union.” Mason is shown by himself, while McCarthy is pictured next to a black child, and Noel plays a coffee-drinking patron at a diner.
It’s just another day on set for Mason, a veteran commercial actor who has starred in spots for the likes of ZipRecruiter, KFC, Target, and Intuitive Surgical, where he played a “surgeon in training.” McCarthy, judging by her IMDB page, is more of a comedic actress, having earned credits for playing “Serenity” in the YouTube series “Sad-Ass Black Folk” and “Girl at Audition #2” in the Keke Palmer mockumentary-style series “That’s The Gag.” Noel, who hails from Canada, is also a veteran commercial actor featured in ads for insurance giant Allstate, underwear brand Saxx, and Prince George, British Columbia’s tourism department.
The spot also features a black woman in military uniform embracing her child. They appear to be actors as well, although the Free Beacon could not identify them.
MSNBC’s primetime talent lineup is overwhelmingly white, and the promotional video’s civil rights theme may have appeared out of whack without the black actors. Most of the hosts featured in the spot—like Lawrence O’Donnell, Joe Scarborough, Mika Brzezinski, Jen Psaki, Chris Hayes, Stephanie Ruhle, Ari Melber, and Nicolle Wallace—are white. Michael Steele and Symone Sanders, cohosts of an early evening show, make an appearance, but it lasts less than one second.
The spot also features a close-up shot of white MSNBC star Stephanie Ruhle wearing a gaudy ring that boasts what appears to be an enormous diamond as the ad’s producers endeavor to show her earnestly taking notes.
The only correspondent featured in the ad is Jacob Soboroff, the white son of the powerful Los Angeles real estate developer and former Los Angeles Police Department commissioner Steve Soboroff. The younger Soboroff, an “immigration reporter” who recently moved over to MSNBC from NBC News, is shown thoughtfully holding a pen over what appears to be a blank Moleskine-type notebook.
The ad’s star, though, is Rachel Maddow, the 52-year-old white woman who until recently was earning $30 million a year to host her show one night per week. She reportedly agreed to reduce her salary to a meager $25 million a year for the next three years.
A second ad in the campaign—narrated by the celebrated black poet Maya Angelou, who died in 2014—also uses Mason, McCarthy, and Noel. In this ad, as Angelou can be heard reading a poem about diversity, Mason is shown with family members—a woman and a small child—and a visibly pregnant McCarthy is again shown with a child, while Noel again sits in a diner. As with the “We the People” spot, this ad intercuts shots of black actors with MSNBC’s white anchors, along with archival news footage of black protesters.
MSNBC’s effort to showcase black people, racial justice, and civil rights in ads promoting an overwhelmingly white slate of news stars reflects the dissonance between the network’s marketing strategy and its striking lack of on-camera diversity.
In a programming shuffle in February, MSNBC fired its most divisive evening host, Joy Reid, who is black, and demoted Alex Wagner, who is half Asian, moves that Maddow decried on air as racist. Psaki, the white former Biden aide, replaced Wagner in primetime.
“I will tell you that it is unnerving to see that on a network two, count ’em, two non-white hosts in primetime, both of our non-white hosts in primetime are losing their shows,” Maddow said in February. “That feels worse than bad, no matter who replaces them. That feels indefensible, and I do not defend it.”
The firing of Reid—whose racist remarks made her position untenable—left MSNBC without any weekday show hosted by a solo black anchor. This is despite MSNBC, with a 20 percent black audience, often ranking in recent years as the most-watched cable channel by African-American viewers. The racial justice-focused MS NOW rebrand suggests Versant is anxious to cater to its outsized black audience.
MSNBC did not respond to a request for comment.
The network unveiled its “MS NOW” rebrand in August as it prepared to spin off from parent company Comcast, which is offloading all of NBCUniversal’s cable channels except for one—Bravo, which was viewed as too valuable to lose—as they were dragging down its share price.
When Versant, the spinoff company, was first announced in late 2024, MSNBC said it would keep its name. This made sense, as MSNBC, which was founded in 1996 as a partnership between Microsoft and NBC News, was allowed to keep the “MS” in its name when Microsoft divested from the partnership in 2005.
Then, in August, MSNBC awkwardly announced it would be renamed “MS NOW,” an acronym for “My Source for News, Opinion and World.” The much-ridiculed name change was reportedly forced by NBC, according to multiple reports, which did not want its brand sullied by the harshly partisan cable network.
Largely apolitical CNBC, which is also being spun off, is being allowed to keep its name, though it, like MSNBC, must drop NBC’s iconic peacock feathers from its logo. The changes will formally go into effect on Nov. 15.
The move to MS NOW did not land well with media insiders. A Variety piece on the change quoted social media users who mocked the new branding. “Looks like it belongs on a discount computer from 1998, not a serious news network,” one said of the MS NOW logo. “Sounds like a medical issue,” another wrote.
A Hollywood Reporter piece on the change—headlined, “Farewell, MSNBC. Hello, ‘My Source for News, Opinion, and the World.’ Wait, What?”—featured similar commentary from editors Erik Hayden and Tony Maglio.
“My first read went something like this: ‘Um, what’s-that-now?'” Maglio said. “If you want your own brand … just start over. ‘MS NOW’ to me reads like it’s a random Microsoft application I’d uninstall from my PC when storage space got tight.”
MSNBC’s original name came about because the network debuted in 1996 as a joint venture between NBC and Microsoft. At the time, MSNBC was not a liberal opinion channel but rather a 24-hour news channel. When the software giant sold its stake years later, Microsoft agreed to let MSNBC keep the “MS” in its name.
The network’s retention of the “MS” acronym for its new name, then, puzzled media experts.
“The MS thing is so weird,” said Maglio. “Microsoft has had exactly zero ties to MSNBC since 2012 (and from the TV channel, since 2005). Back then, you wouldn’t want to change a web address or an established channel/brand name. But now, why not?”
The awkwardness of the name change may be what led Versant to authorize the $20 million marketing campaign complete with the paid actors.
Television “primetime” begins at 8 pm and ends at 11 pm, according to longtime broadcast conventions. This time frame would mean that only 1 out of the 15 primetime hours of MSNBC programming per week has black hosts (or any hosts of color). The Steele-Sanders show, which they co-host along with Alicia Menendez, a white Cuban-American, airs for three hours on Mondays—until 9 pm—and ends at 8 pm the rest of the week.
Black hosts are more prominent on MSNBC’s weekend programming, where several of the hosts are black, including Eugene Daniels, Jonathan Capehart, Antonia Hylton, and the Rev. Al Sharpton. MSNBC, like the rest of the television news business, has long been criticized for shunting its black hosts to the lower priority, less desirable weekend shift—what in TV news insider jargon is known as “the weekend ghetto.”
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