MSNBC

MSNBC is an American basic cable and satellite television network that provides news coverage and political opinion on current events. It is owned by the NBCUniversal News Group, a unit of the NBCUniversal Television Group division of NBCUniversal.

MSNBC and msnbc.com were founded in 1996 as separate partnerships between Microsoft and General Electric's NBC unit, hence the network's naming. Although they shared the same name, msnbc.com and MSNBC maintained separate corporate structures and news operations, with msnbc.com headquartered on the West Coast on the Microsoft campus in Redmond, Washington, and MSNBC in the NBC headquarters in New York. Microsoft divested its stake in the MSNBC channel in 2005, and divested its stake in msnbc.com in July 2012, rebranding the general news site as NBCNews.com and creating a new msnbc.com as the online home of the cable news channel. As of February 2015, approximately 94,531,000 households (81.2% of those with television) receive MSNBC within the United States of America.

Beginning in the mid-2000s, MSNBC's opinion programming increasingly reflected its concept of political progressivism. In October 2010, it publicly acknowledged this with a marketing campaign it called "Lean Forward". Further, in September 2013, MSNBC launched its revamped official website under the tagline, "What Progressives Have Been Waiting For." Commentators have described MSNBC as having a bias towards left-leaning politics and the Democratic Party. In 2011 Politico referred to MSNBC as "left-leaning." In reference to changes in the channel's evening programming, senior vice president of NBC News Phil Griffin has said that "it happened naturally. There isn't a dogma we're putting through. There is a 'Go for it.'"

For the week of June 9, 2014, MSNBC placed 26th in primetime and 30th in total day, averaging 597,000 viewers and 336,000 viewers, respectively.