This week, Mark Lazarus, the prospective chief executive of Versant, announced that MSNBC would change its name to My Source News Opinion World, or MSNOW—a rebrand so intrinsically satirizable that, after covering the announcement, media organizations from The New York Times to Variety felt compelled to publish follow-up items about the derision and ridicule it had inspired. In the annals of corporate nomenclature, only Tribune Publishing’s short-lived transformation into “tronc” (yes, all lowercase) could be seen as similarly risible. Critics noted MSNOW’s obvious connotations with multiple sclerosis, the long-defunct HBO Now, a fusion of Ms. magazine and the National Organization for Women, and the frozen water that crystallizes and falls to the ground in winter. As one high-level NBCUniversal insider texted me, “It does seem like an Accenture consultant had a bad day at Sweetgreens and was like, fuck it.”

Alas, there were reasons. Executives at NBCU had decided they did not want their brand, nor NBC News—a nominally down-the-middle broadcast news network—to maintain an affiliation with the avowedly liberal cable network. (Tellingly, NBCU had no qualms about CNBC—officially, the Consumer News and Business Channel—maintaining its farcical acronym.) It thus fell upon Lazarus and MSNBC president Rebecca Kutler to find an alternative. Laz characterized this as “an opportunity to chart our own path forward,” but, from a brand marketing perspective, they’d obviously been dealt a terrible hand.

MSNBC was already a case study in the value of brand consistency. More than a decade earlier, when Microsoft sold its last stake in the network, then-NBCU chief Steve Burke and then-MSNBC president Phil Griffin considered a rebrand that would have abandoned the suddenly obsolete five-letter mashup. But as one source present at the time told me, “Every study we did told us we were out of our mind: You’ve got a great brand, don’t fuck with it.” So the “MS” stuck, despite the network having severed all ties with Microsoft.

Laz and Kutler’s decision followed a similar logic, while also betraying some inconvenient truths about their prospects. Like other cable news networks, MSNBC is a decidedly profitable business, netting what I’m told is north of $500 million in annual profits. The vast majority of its revenue derives from linear carriage fees and advertising, all of which will need to flow inward after the spinoff. In order to maintain that cashflow, MSNBC didn’t want to risk any brand confusion on the channel guide, especially given that more than 90 percent of its audience is AARP-eligible. In essence, Laz and Kutler sacrificed the opportunity for a genuinely bold, future-facing rebrand in order to ensure that octogenarians scrolling through their Spectrum channel guide would still be able to find Lawrence O’Donnell. (“The most important thing to Rebecca was keeping the ‘MS’ in the name,” a source close to Kutler told me.)

On some level, that makes perfect sense: In cable’s post-spin era, almost all networks are going to be milked for cash while the businesses right-size for a smaller and more fiscally responsible digital future. Laz and Kutler would be insane to leave money on the table—especially since they’ll now be footing the bill for their own bureaus, reporters, and newsgathering infrastructure, all of which is going to put a heavy dent in the aforementioned profit margins. On the bright side, I’m told their channel distribution isn’t changing, so at least the channel numbers will stay the same.

Still, the rebrand highlights just how beholden the new MSNBC is to a declining business model and, well, the past. So much of the fanfare around the network’s future has centered on it being a “well-funded startup” that could finally reap the rewards of its own profits and invest in new revenue streams: digital, podcasts, live events. As one MSNBC source put it, “We’re not building roller coasters for Universal Studios anymore; we’re investing in TikTok and audio.” And yet, the allegiance to the linear brand is a reminder that the core business remains tethered to an old format. As one NBC source put it, “Nothing about the new name signals ‘startup.’”

Indeed, MSNOW isn’t a startup. It’s a soon-to-be orphaned cable network that hopes to maintain a healthy-enough linear business until Nexstar or Sinclair comes knocking, or until a private equity firm like Apollo takes over and expedites the value extraction. Kutler’s ability to layer a meaningful podcast network or live events business on top of that would be a nice icing on the cake for that prospective buyer—and an opportunity for some good press along the way. But it won’t have any material impact on revenue. Divorcing the company from the mothership merely puts enhanced pressure on the management team to optimize its current assets without the luxury or shielding of a larger parentco.

In fact, MSNOW is going to spend the next two years telling a compelling story about its investments in talent, new products, and new formats, waving a “growth” narrative around the digital business while the linear ATM continues its long grind to a halt. Conceivably, Kutler, a highly competitive programmer and Zucker protégé, is as capable as anyone of telling that story. But it sure is hard to start with a name that reads like a ChatGPT hallucination, and a logo that looks like it was created in MS Paint.

For now, everyone is putting on a brave face—what else is there to do?—but you have to wonder when an inflection point might occur. When will, say, a top talent leave to start their own Megyn Kelly–style media business on the left? Or could Kutler, a natural of the form, succumb to recruitment to run some larger roll-up play at a private equity behemoth? Alas, a bleaker outcome might occur if they don’t. One of the existential challenges of the format is that it is deeply in need of reinvention and notably short of visionaries.