‘We Could Be Fired Tomorrow!’: ‘Morning Joe’ Awkwardly Jokes About Comcast Selling Off MSNBC

BRZEZINSKI: “All right. Time now for a look at some of the other stories making headlines this morning. Comcast, which owns our parent company NBCUniversal, plans to spin off its cable TV networks. That’s according to ‘The Wall Street Journal’ and people familiar with the situation. The company will separate off entertainment and news channels, including MSNBC, CNBC, USA, Oxygen, E!, SYFY —“
SCARBOROUGH: “Wow.”
BRZEZINSKI: “— and the Golf Channel.”
SCARBOROUGH: “So it’s spinning off.”
BRZEZINSKI: “The new cable venture will reportedly have an ownership structure that mirrors Comcast. Comcast spokesperson declined to comment.”
SCARBOROUGH: “So — so Willie, as you look at the screen right there, the big concern that stockholders right now on Wall Street are wondering about before they decide what to do with Comcast shares is whether Mika is going to have to give up her penthouse —“
BRZEZINSKI: “No, no.”
SCARBOROUGH: “— perch atop the Comcast building.”
GEIST: “First thought I had too. What happens to the —“
BRZEZINSKI: “Since I never had it.”
GEIST: “When are we going to get invited to the penthouse?”
SCARBOROUGH: “Never. They never let us up. I will say really quickly on this, you know, a drudge at the top said, ‘Oh, like news meltdown, all this other stuff.’ I mean, I could be completely wrong. We could all be fired a year from now. Well here what has happened. You never know what’s going to happen —“
BRZEZINSKI: “Or tomorrow.”
SCARBOROUGH: “Or — yeah. But — but in this case, though, Willie, what they’re doing is what other media firms are doing. You spin off the cable channels, which seven years ago were making a ton of money. Now they’ve got to figure out how to make them profitable.”
BRZEZINSKI: “Yeah.”
SCARBOROUGH: “Disney, which — by the way, huge media news, Disney has figured out now how to make streaming profitable. Peacock had an extraordinary success in the Olympics. But — so they’re talking about spinning this off. Comcast still owns — I think Brian Roberts still owns a third of that. And because Comcast didn’t jump into the bidding war like everybody else, throwing stupid money at streaming services and then watch it flop, Comcast has a ton of cash. So now they spin this off and they’re in a position to — to what do you all say, to — to — to get a lot of — to get a lot of different —“
BARNICLE: “Consolidate.”
BRZEZINSKI: “Con —“
SCARBOROUGH: “Consolodate, but also to just ramp up. And so you get a lot of people, a lot of different channels together. And so whatever that entity is going to be, there’ll probably be a lot of cable channels and to be in a much better position to scale. They’re scaling. I didn’t — I took one business class at University of Alabama.” [crosstalk]
LEMIRE: “We’re all staring at you.”
BRZEZINSKI: “I’m glad you gave us your analysis.” [crosstalk]
SCARBOROUGH: “The only thing that makes sense here is you — you spin it off and then you scale it up and then you figure out how to make it more profitable.”
GEIST: “Yeah, this is to keep these networks like this network healthy and to keep Comcast thriving the way it is. And this is just the way it’s going. People are cutting the cord right? The cable subscribers are down across the board. This is something Bob Iger talked about last year doing —“
SCARBOROUGH: “Right.”
GEIST: “— with ABC and Disney and spinning off some of those networks. We’ll see if he does that as well. But I think internally it’s viewed as a good thing. It gets everyone in a healthy position to continue to thrive moving forward.”
BRZEZINSKI: “All right.”