Keep in mind, Comcast owns NBC as well. So probably we’ll get a lot of negative coverage of Elon Musk on NBC and MSNBC in the process.
It’s much easier to lobby against a public villain than a public hero.
So every tweet by Musk will be amplified out of context.
Wouldn’t surprise me even some allegations of foreign impropriety will surface and soon having starlink becomes a national security unless it’s sold to Comcast or it’s offered in a way that won’t compete with Comcast.
I know it's very hip and cool to be cynical about journalistic independence these days but newsrooms still take the concept very seriously. There's simply no mechanism by which the CEO of Comcast could simultaneously a) meaningfully affect NBC's coverage of Elon Musk and b) not have it be an open secret and scandal within the industry.
I've worked on the product side of legacy media companies before and trust me, given the disorganization I was seeing in the editorial departments at my peer orgs, they couldn't have pulled this off even if they wanted to.
NBC's coverage of Elon isn't any more negative than it's sister orgs and the simple, occam's razor explanation is that his ridiculous behavior is absurdly good at generating clicks rather than any organized media endeavor against him.
On “journalistic independence”, NBC told Ed Schultz not to cover Bernie Sanders and why Schultz and Cenk both left the network [1]
Im sure we can agree that ratings are one of the key drivers and pushed by management. Here’s how cable media profited by covering Trump. This Trump coverage resulted in 160% increase in ratings and in return gave Trump $3 billion [2]in free advertising ( I’ve seen $5billion number in total free coverage as well).
Look it's one thing to hate on big corporations for existing actions, but's entirely something else to invent conspiracy theories. In reality Comcast isn't threatened by Starlink because Starlink market is aimed at less populated areas so Comcast has no need to fight it. It would be completely oversaturated by cities and cities are easy to invest in building network infrastructure.
Now, I could imagine other satellite internet companies to fight it, but they're much less powerful.
Comcast has repeatedly lobbied for legislation to prevent the creation of municipal broadband providers; it's not that much of a stretch that they could try to use regulatory capture to attack Starlink as well.
A new worldwide internet provider being led by a pioneer of innovation is a major threat to comcast. Especially since Musk is known for caring about providing a valuable product at a fair price to the masses (the Model 3).
Elon Musk aside, who wouldn't drop comcast/verizon in a second if there were another viable option at a better price?
Starlink doesn't have to completely match Comcast one-to-one, they just have to be a credible competitor. That increases the bargaining power of the consumer. Particularly as Starlink grows and as OneWeb and especially Project Kuiper comes online.
These low-latency satellite constellations will reduce the local oligopoly/monopoly rents (and thus profitability) of Comcast, AT&T, Verizon, CenturyLink, Cox, Frontier, etc... And the money that would've been profit will go to consumers' pockets, even if they don't themselves subscribe.
