The US is in the middle of a strange kind of culture war at the moment, and it's extended into graphic design. Routine rebranding exercises like the new Cracker Barrel logo are suddenly blasted as 'woke' for following the same corporate design trend brands have been following since forever.
But the past week saw a rare piece of design news that brought a torn nation together: the rebrand of the cable news channel MSNBC as MS NOW, or My Source News Opinion World. For a few brief moments, Americans united to pile on in a good old-fashioned logo design roasting.
For those not familiar with the highly politicised broadcast media landscape in the US, MSNBC leans more to the left, at least in comparison to the rabid Fox News. But its decision to change its name to MS Now by the end of the year has sparked incredulity on both sides of the political spectrum.
First, there's the confusing name. Are we supposed to pronounce 'NOW' as one word or sound out each letter? And 'My Source News Opinion World' sounds so forced that it could only have been conceived as a backronym.
And then there's the logo design, sporting a strange thick white stroke on a mark that appears to be the Austrian flag. It's presumably an attempt to reclaim the stars and stripes from the right, but as well as resembling the flag of a different country, it looks like “something you’d scroll past in a pile of political campaign logos from 2004,” as political strategist Gabriella Sulig put it on LinkedIn. It's not exactly one of the best TV logos.
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“For our viewers who have watched us for decades, it may be hard to imagine this network by any other name,” MSNBC said in a statement, adding that the change gives it “the freedom to chart our own path forward”. But it seems people can imagine it by plenty of other names, with many taking to social media to share their own interpretations of what MS NOW might stand for.
“Multiple Sclerosis Now. Is this some kind of new show?” a former news anchor asked, referring to the neurological illness commonly abbreviated to MS. “Most Surely No One Watching,” someone else has suggested, while others are reading it as 'Ms Now'.
It's not clear what web address the renamed channel will be able to use either. Msnow.com appears to be taken by a Korean snow mobile company.
The MSNBC name is a portmanteau that dates back to the channel's origins in 1996 as a joint venture between Microsoft (MS) and the National Broadcasting Company (NBC, part of Comcast).
Microsoft sold its stake over a decade ago, and NBC is preparing to spin the channel off, leaving it with no relation to either company. And it has no choice other than to rebrand since Comcast retains ownership of the NBC name and signature NBC peacock logo.
That means the channel could have started afresh with something completely different. Other than Fox, which is named after the Hungarian immigrant producer Vilmos Fuchs, most major channels' names are acronyms that have become random letters for many viewers. They only gave meaning because of the brand legacy built up over time. MS Now seems to have chosen an awkward name just so it could hang on to the letters 'MSN' for recognition's sake, when there was probably no need.
We'll have to see if the name grows on people. If not, this might be a rebrand that leads to as much flipflopping as the HBO Max rebrand.
