Here's the problem (and, potentially, the blessing-in-disguise): The bundle that has bolstered MSNBC and its fellow networks may be disintegrating. Last fall, HBO announced that it would be launching a "stand-alone, over-the-top HBO service in the United States" in 2015. The move has been generally interpreted as a harbinger of “the great unbundling,” and also (possibly, eventually) of the death of cable. As my colleague Derek Thompson laid it out:

The irony is that if HBO Go-It-Alone succeeds in expanding both audience and profit for its parent company Time Warner, it will inspire copy-cats. And if you have enough copy-cats experimenting with stand-alone products, the mini-bundle cobbled together among Internet TV options will get bigger, while subscriptions to cable's mega-bundle will shrink, threatening the profits of ... companies like Time Warner.

You could read the de-left-wing-ing of MSNBC as a preemptive response to that eventuality. If the great unbundling is indeed upon us, it will mean that the networks, in fairly short order, will no longer be able to coast on Guy Fieri Money. MSNBC will have to grow more responsive to the slings and arrows of viewer attentions. It will have to be more vigilant about its brand; it will have to be more daring. It will also have to be more cautious. And re-organizing itself under non-partisan (or at least "non-partisan") principles may be a way for the network both to broaden its appeal and to protect itself for the long term against political contingencies—to keep itself, basically, from getting Daily Showed.

MSNBC, like most every other media outlet on the planet, is contending with the rise of the Internet—and with the Internet's ability, in particular, to fracture audiences and question "prime time" and disaggregate that which used to be bundled. What, actually, does it mean to be a news network in a networked world? Any response to that question that involves dampening partisan passions, rather than exploiting them, Fox News-style, could well be foolish. (Cenk Uygur, the host of YouTube's popular Young Turks show, called MSNBC’s shift away from partisanship a terrible strategy move for the network—and a great one, given all those poachable partisans, for him.) The Internet, in its side job as an outrage machine, tends to reward strong feelings regardless of the ideas they're directed to.

Then again. The partisan enthusiasms shared by Uygur and Fox and MSNBC, which are wonderful and terrible in all the well-worn ways, have a countervailing force: the voracious breadth of social media. In a world that finds Facebook taking over some of the psychic space that used to be occupied by the nightly news, the media outlets that are in the best position, business-wise and otherwise, are the ones that create the stuff people want to share. Sometimes that stuff is partisan, sure, but for the most part it's the opposite. The ascendance of Vice and the Buzzfeed is revealing, and not just of the fact that Americans love videos and gifs. The sociologist Pablo Boczkowski talks about the hesitation people often feel in talking about politics in a work environment, where such discussions may lead to unnecessary fractures and offenses; you can extend that logic to Facebook and the rest of the social media sphere. Maybe you want to tell that guy you know from third grade exactly how you feel about the Obamacare rollout; there's a very good chance, though, that you do not. There's a very good chance you'd rather send him a picture of a housecat cuddling a bunny and call it a day.