MSNBC’s Rebrand to MS NOW Invites Bemusement and Ridicule

When MSNBC announced on Monday that it was being renamed MS NOW, some of the cable network’s biggest stars expressed their support.

“It looks very sporty,” Joe Scarborough said on air as he announced the brand change, which includes a new logo. A graphic showed a striped flag and five capital letters: MS NOW, for My Source News Opinion World.

Outside the network, the rebrand immediately became a subject of bemusement and mockery.

A political strategist in Milwaukee, Gabriella Suliga, wrote that the red, white and blue design “looks like something you’d scroll past in a pile of political campaign logos from 2004.”

“Multiple sclerosis now. Is this some kind of new show?” said Rob Archer, who has worked as a news anchor in Los Angeles, playing on the chronic neurological disorder commonly abbreviated to M.S.

Some conservatives gave the left-leaning network their own name: “Most Surely No One Watching.” (MSNBC lags far behind Fox News in ratings, drawing 865,000 average prime-time viewers in July, according to Nielsen.)

MSNBC began in 1996 as a joint venture between the National Broadcasting Company, NBC, and Microsoft. Microsoft eventually sold its stake in the venture, but its abbreviation remained in the MSNBC brand.

The rebranding, expected by the end of the year as part of MSNBC’s corporate spinoff from Comcast’s NBCUniversal TV empire, was far from the first to invite ridicule.

Aberdeen, a British investment firm, dropped most of its vowels in 2021 and became “abrdn” in a widely mocked effort to seem more “modern.” Gap, the clothing retailer, changed its logo in 2010 and drew a flood of negative comments online. Both companies eventually reversed the changes.

Some social media users also drew parallels to how Warner Bros. Discovery executives switched back and forth between calling their streaming service “HBO Max” and simply “Max,” a name that had caused confusion.

“I would not be surprised in the next six months to see a slight shift,” Zachary Winterton, a creative director in Portland, Ore., said of MS NOW.

One brand strategist, Oliver Errichiello, who has advised more than 200 companies, called the rebrand “a big failure.” He noted that it did not retain elements of NBC’s signature peacock, a logo recognized by television viewers for nearly a century, and one that many graphic designers regard as one of the best corporate marks of all time.

The new logo “does not have the same charm to it,” said Allan Peters, a graphic designer in Eagan, Minn., who has written a book about logo design and said he was sad to see the peacock go away.

Some social media users expressed confusion around why the “MS” remained in the network’s name 20 years after the end of its TV partnership with Microsoft, outlasting the “NBC” association that only just finished.

Mr. Peters said that the space between the logo and the capital letters was larger than that between “MS” and “NOW,” exacerbating the confusion by drawing attention to the “MS.”

“Microsoft hasn’t been involved in years,” Carmen Harris, a communications specialist in McKinney, Texas, wrote on social media. “I don’t get it.”

Some said the new branding bore a resemblance to that of some conservative cable networks, such as the right-wing One America News Network.

“I wonder if this is a purposeful reimagining to try to appropriate that conservative image, but I don’t see the network itself really doing that,” said Mr. Archer, the news anchor.

Rebecca Kutler, MSNBC’s president, said in a memo that the rebrand will not change the network’s core identity or its editorial focus.

“While our name will be changing, who we are and what we do will not,” she said.