For those of you who believe that secret messages are being subliminally hidden in advertising or if you play a heavy metal song backwards, say, the new logo for the rebrand of MSNBC will let you have a field day.
If you haven’t been following the sturm und drang regarding NBC’s dopey progressive cable annex — and one doesn’t blame you, since life in general and summer in particular is too short — the network is nearing its divorce with its parent company, which is spinning off its cable channels.
Most of the channels NBCUniversal is offloading into a spin-off company now known as Versant (an upgrade from its previous name, the wonderfully unimaginative SpinCo) likely won’t see a major change in how they do things. MSNBC is different: Not only did the NBC initials lend it what was termed, back when the network was founded in the 1990s, “gravitas,” but the NBC News umbrella also gave it access to a whole host of resources it would now have to put together itself, as well as generating value.
That last part was the source of much drama in and of itself; unpopular controversialist Joy Reid’s firing was called racist by many at the network — including star anchor Rachel Maddow, who insinuated that something bigoted was afoot, given this “has never happened at this scale in this way before when it comes to programming changes.” (So she claimed, anyway.)
Some were aghast that the man running the new operation was a “golf bro,” who an MSNBC staffer said “could have a MAGA hat at home, and we wouldn’t know.” J’accuse!
And now, we have the anti-Trump network’s new name: MS NOW. The acronym is supposed to stand for “My Source News Opinion World.” It might as well stand for “Maybe Some Newer Options Would (Have Helped Us Come Up With a Better Name),” the way the acronym and the quarter-hearted effort that went into the branding came across:
BREAKING: MSDNC is officially rebranding to “MS Now.”
What a horrible logo! Looks like it was made on Microsoft paint.
A more accurate name would have been BS Now. pic.twitter.com/DH9CLf6M7l
— CJ Pearson (@thecjpearson) August 18, 2025
Don’t besmirch Microsoft Paint like that, C.J. (Fun fact: the “MS” in “MSNBC” stands for Microsoft, which was originally part of a joint venture to establish the channel. Both are gone, which tells you just how much value the outlet has.)
However, there was another problem with this logo, as the U.K.’s Daily Mail noted. See that American flag to the left of the logotype? It looks kind of like a K, and that doesn’t require any squinting to notice.
That’s kind of a problem, because in online lingo, “KMS NOW” means “kill myself now.” Good work, rebranding team!
MSNBC’s new logo needs rethinking. Looks like KMS Now. pic.twitter.com/qifJwcPuFQ
— Dan Hargrove (@DanHargrov66812) August 21, 2025
The unfortunate new MSNBC LOGO looks like it says KMS NOW!
Good advice for a dead news station!! pic.twitter.com/AVrAl89Cpl— RitaNarducci (@RitaNarducci) August 18, 2025
Indeed, maybe corporate euthanasia might have been the best alternative here.
Sure, it doesn’t take much to run a news network on cable these days (see also: NewsNation), but it does take a bit, and MSNBC’s bona fides were backed up by the fact that, while it was basically a progressive opinion channel, they could bring in real reporters and contributors from staid establishment-liberal NBC News if the need arose.
That’s gone now. NBC wants nothing to do with this, because it at least feigns journalistic objectivity — and the words “journalistic objectivity” and “Rachel Maddow” go together like “Megan Thee Stallion song” and “kid-friendly Spotify playlist.”
So now, it needs to justify its existence by 1) spending more money than it did to get news-gathering resources and 2) making more money than it did by getting views.
How did it begin this process in earnest? By a rebrand that wasn’t just cringeworthy in its appalling lack of effort or originality, but where the people in charge of branding apparently overlooked the fact that its new logo looks like an acronym for “kill myself now.”
Maybe this’ll work out in the end, somehow. If the logo unveil is any augury, though, I’d feel pretty solid if I had a job at CNN right now. Those are words I’d never thought I’d be uttering, but when your primary competitor can’t seem to do anything right, there you go.
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