As anxieties run high throughout the media business, MSNBC‘s Ari Melber sees the positives in the channel’s pending spinoff from Comcast, meaning that NBC News no longer will be a sister organization.
“We always had great advantages from collaborating with a network,” Melber said. “Now we’re completely independent, and sometimes your collaborators will become healthy peers and competitors. If you want one lyric, there’s a rap line, ‘idols become rivals.’ “
Known for infusing lyrics into his commentary, Melber, who has hosted The Beat since 2017, also cites another fact of the pending separation: The rebranded MS NOW will no longer be part of a massive media organization but part of the spinoff Versant, at a time when the Trump administration “keeps trying to use different leverage points against large companies.”
On Saturday, Melber will take part in MSNBC Live ’25, the network’s paid live event at the Hammerstein Ballroom in New York, featuring an array of network personalities in conversations and interviews before an audience of fervent fans.
The benefit, Melber said, is the immediate feedback in the room. Attorney Andrew Weissmann, a guest last year, was embraced like “he could have been a New York Yankee,” he said.
Melber cited the level of interest people have about legal issues, like, “Why does this law apply, or that one seems to be ignored? And what really happens if there’s a constitutional crisis or the court said something and the government doesn’t respond?”
“Those type of questions, especially if they come up a lot, make me realize, ‘Oh, people might want to go deeper.’ ” As a case in point, a 45-minute extended conversation with author Francis Fukuyama, posted on YouTube earlier this year, has generated 2.7 million views.
Melber also said that, in “tense and polarized” and “fraught” times, being with other people in person tends to change the energy, in the same way people still go to a movie theater “versus us all being in our own isolated screening experience.”
Melber’s show, often centered on legal affairs, has nevertheless drawn particular attention for interviews with Trump administration figures, including the host’s recent contentious exchange with Tom Homan, serving as the administration’s border czar. Melber also appears to be staying put as the spinoff approaches, though he didn’t go into details.
Melber spoke with Deadline about the next battlefront on the legal beat, the pending split from Comcast and what resonates on YouTube.
DEADLINE: There are a lot of concerns about the administration’s attacks on the media, which kind of blew up with the Jimmy Kimmel situation. Where do you see the next legal battle lines?
MELBER: The administration has taken more overt actions to censor, criticize, legally harass and demand money from news and other media platforms … than any American administration in the modern era. And that’s just a fact. And while we hear so much about polarized views, this is an administration that, on a very flimsy legal basis, is trying to sue both [Rupert] Murdoch’s Wall Street Journal and the New York Times. So the FCC may have waged an unconstitutional effort to censor Jimmy Kimmel and lost, and everyone noticed that Kimmel is a Trump critic. [Trump has] done it to the Murdoch empire when they simply disagree with a story that has not in any way been corrected or found to be lacking. So that is a huge attack on the First Amendment.
[Brendan Carr, the chairman of the FCC, has since claimed that he was not threatening ABC stations, though figures on the left and right saw it that way].
There are many experts who say, and at least on the basis of in this time period, under one year, [there have been] more anti-First Amendment actions than any other administration. So that’s a huge challenge for the press, because it’s a real-world financial and legal effort against these news organizations, while reporters still have to do their jobs and also not be drawn in. … We as journalists have to try not to be drawn into a mode where just because they’re suing some reporters or some news outlets, that we then take that mode of being in a default battle with everyone in the administration. We should have the normal independent, fearless, critical, adversarial news coverage, but shouldn’t let an outside lawsuit that they pick and that may ultimately be tossed, affect it.
DEADLINE: Just given what happened with Kimmel, do you see a situation where more corporations will start standing up to the administration?
MELBER: Many companies traditionally look at certain lawsuits as something that they can settle to make a challenge go away. And in law that’s sometimes called a nuisance suit, where big companies are sued and they could win in court, but the nuisance of it is small, and they would rather just settle and move on. There are entire lawyers whose practices are actually built on them. This is not that category. Companies like Disney, who thought that was the category and in settling an ABC lawsuit meant they would then [make it go away], found the opposite. [In December, Disney settled a Trump lawsuit against ABC News for $16 million.] The late hawk Donald Rumsfeld famously said “weakness is provocative,” and that’s true in strategy and foreign policy and if the government is politicizing everything. Again, that’s coming from the government, then it’s true there. And so Disney learned that settling the first suit it did not buy them time. They were very quickly facing an even bigger, more unprecedented and more financially large attack. Then, after we all watched what happened, the president was publicly threatening them again with more lawsuits. Some companies are maybe learning that lesson. Others have their own reasons, and I don’t want to speculate on the internal process that I’m not privy to, reporting on. But this is measurably not a normal time, and most nuisance suits are not brought by the most powerful person in the world.
DEADLINE: We saw a ruling from Judge William Young that admonished the administration. He’s not the first one. Do you think these individual decisions resonate with the public, or is to send a message to the Supreme Court?
MELBER: We are seeing judges who’ve been appointed by members of both parties stand up for the rule of law and against this ongoing effort by the Trump administration to clearly, clearly test what powers can be seized, either by doing things and expecting the Supreme Court to feel [the same way] about or by testing what they can get away with, that’s somehow short of what the high court deems a constitutional crisis. So we’ll see if this is more like the past, where ultimately the courts play a key role as a check on runaway power, or whether we’re in some different phase. And Donald Trump won the last election. Voters knew a lot about him at that point, and that is our system for his policy ideas. Nothing about that valid win erases the Constitution, the rule of law and the other checks in our democratic systems. And so what we’ve seen quickly is an effort to see whether he can turn that normal election victory into some wider effort to rewrite laws. And one example is, everyone knows that the Constitution is above executive orders. If it wasn’t, then the president could rewrite the Constitution any time. So you don’t need to be a lawyer to know that when he writes executive orders that flatly defy the Constitution, that’s signaling a desire to be above the Constitution, to be a king. And most White House lawyers across administrations would always tell the president, “You can’t do that. It will lose in court later, but you can’t do it now, and it’s bad to do it now.” And we’re way past that line for him already.
DEADLINE: You have featured a number of Trump administration officials through the years on your show, Tom Homan being one of the most recent examples. What is the special challenge now of interviewing a figure from the administration?
MELBER: It’s important to give people in these campaigns and government debates a chance to be heard directly, and also it can … [be] important for the system to hold them accountable instead of [a situation] where they are given endless airtime with no adversarial questioning. … I think the reason people come back, even with what sometimes might be called a tough but fair interview, is that it will still be fundamentally respectful and journalistic. And so I think that’s why they come back. The challenge is that we are now in an environment where the government wants to be in open attack and in control of, even censoring some of the free press, or what they perceive as critics. That’s obviously what’s happening, but it’s not going to change how I conduct an interview.
DEADLINE: Why do you think a figure like Tom Homan comes on? His boss calls MSNBC “MSDNC” all the time.
MELBER: There’s a lot of gap between political bluster in general, and certainly how President Trump talks and what actually happens. So the the public political effort to undermine people’s trust in various sources, which includes the Wall Street Journal, may have its own political goal. If there are journalists or shows that still are relevant, reach a lot of people, and can have a back and forth, clearly it’s been demonstrated that the Trump campaign, the administration and the MAGA movement will engage with those folks.
DEADLINE: Who would you like to interview in the administration?
MELBER: Right now, I think Attorney General Pam Bondi is at the center of so many big, important issues, and there are open questions facing the DOJ on a host of issues, so that would be a very newsworthy interview to have.
DEADLINE: The split from Comcast. How different will it be for you? Will you be there long term?
MELBER: I’m on every night, and really feel solid about working for this great news organization and doing it during what are pretty exciting times. MS NOW is the rebrand that our viewers will come to know us as, but it’s like many such naming exercises — a tweak and a name for a news organization and a group of people, that our audience knows very well. So I think as they see that it’s the same people on air and the same exact same programming, that’s fine. As for our new home, we’re going to be more independent as a company, and I think that always with change, which can be hard, [there is] opportunity, because we are in a space where our linear TV ratings put us above the vast majority of TV channels like cable. In that in that sense, the company is in a great position. Everybody knows that cable has evolved, and a lot of channels have struggled. Top news and sports still do pretty well for the obvious reason that it’s live and a little different than stuff that’s migrated to streaming. And then over on streaming and YouTube, MSNBC has often been now equal with Fox [News], where some months we beaten them, some months we’re close, but we are much closer to them in streaming with the younger audience than in traditional TV ratings.
DEADLINE: What have you learned about how to get an audience on YouTube?
MELBER: We’ve seen some nights this year even more views for a YouTube segment from the show than sometimes for a whole show. So this is doubling the audience for that material, and I think most journalists want their work to be seen. We’re not doing diary entries or diary videos. We’ve learned that there is a news audience there. It comes back repeatedly, maybe a little different than TV, but it comes back, and it really prizes … facts, details. Our most watched piece this year, with over three and a half million views, was a 20-minute special report on state power, what the founders called federalism. So that is important, but it’s not the most political controversy. It’s not [a Jeffrey] Epstein story. It’s a breakdown on exactly why there’s legal powers vested in states that the president cannot override, and that is obviously relevant. Our second most watched video in the Trump second term mixes legal reporting with the Kimmel controversy, and it was a breakdown from two weeks ago about why nine Justices of the Supreme Court recently upheld First Amendment rights against government meddling. In other words, if ABC ever had to go to court, they would very clearly win before this court on the efforts to censor Kimmel. And now, two weeks later, everyone kind of knows what happened.
DEADLINE: You mentioned independence and the transition to MS NOW. How will that play in your day-to-day situation? How will that make a difference not having NBC News as a sister news organization?
MELBER: Within media, it means we are independent in offering all of our reporting, interviews and storytelling as its own independent MSNBC brand. … We’re in an environment where the government keeps trying to use different leverage points against large companies. So forget what I think. The incumbent government thinks the larger the company, the more it can squeeze or pressure other parts of a company to affect independent news. That’s a basic, and we are going to be a very capitalized, strong, independent company, as our management said. But we’re going to be independent, so there won’t be other places for the government to use that playbook here. … I think it’s great to have leadership that stands by exactly what MSNBC does, and to be independent against some of that environment seems pretty obviously to be a net positive for independent journalism.
