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A company-wide email from Comcast executives, sent to everyone working at NBCUniversal on Friday morning, mourns right-wing pundit Charlie Kirk’s death and reminds employees that saying the wrong thing about Kirk’s legacy can get you fired swiftly.
The email, obtained by 404 Media and first reported by Variety, has the subject line “A message from Brian Roberts, Mike Cavanagh, and Mark Lazarus.” In it, the executives eulogize Kirk, calling him an “advocate for open debate, whose faith was important to him.”
Roberts is the Chairman and CEO of Comcast Corporation, Cavanagh is the president, and Lazarus is the prospective CEO of VERSANT, Comcast’s new spinoff that will include the majority of its NBCUniversal cable network portfolio. NBC, MSNBC, CNBC, Bravo and more journalistic and entertainment properties are under the NBCUniversal umbrella.
“You may have seen that MSNBC recently ended its association with a contributor who made an unacceptable and insensitive comment about this horrific event,” the executives wrote. “That coverage was at odds with fostering civil dialogue and being willing to listen to the points of view of those who have differing opinions.”
Political analyst Matthew Dowd was fired from MSNBC on Wednesday after speaking about Kirk’s death on air. During a broadcast on Wednesday following the shooting, anchor Katy Tur asked Dowd about “the environment in which a shooting like this happens,” according to Variety. Dowd answered: “He’s been one of the most divisive, especially divisive younger figures in this, who is constantly sort of pushing this sort of hate speech or sort of aimed at certain groups. And I always go back to, hateful thoughts lead to hateful words, which then lead to hateful actions. And I think that is the environment we are in. You can’t stop with these sort of awful thoughts you have and then saying these awful words and not expect awful actions to take place. And that’s the unfortunate environment we are in.”
MSNBC president Rebecca Kutler issued an apology in response, calling Dowd’s words “inappropriate, insensitive and unacceptable.” Dowd also apologized publicly, posting on Bluesky: “On an earlier appearance on MSNBC I was asked a question on the environment we are in. I apologize for my tone and words. Let me be clear, I in no way intended for my comments to blame Kirk for this horrendous attack.”
Jason Koebler
MSNBC is a division of NBCUniversal. The letter from Comcast executives reiterates to current employees that their jobs are on the line if they stray from bland, milquetoast statements about a man who spent his life fomenting hate will have consequences on their careers. The entire mainstream media environment has been working overtime to sanitize Kirk’s legacy since his murder—a legacy that includes targeted harassment of professors at schools across the country and normalizing the notion that basic human rights are up for “debate.”
The full email is below.
Dear Comcast NBCUniversal Team,
The tragic loss of Charlie Kirk, a 31-year-old father, husband, and advocate for open debate, whose faith was important to him, reminds us of the fragility of life and the urgent need for unity in our nation. Our hearts are heavy, as his passing leaves a grieving family and a country grappling with division. There is no place for violence or hate in our society.
You may have seen that MSNBC recently ended its association with a contributor who made an unacceptable and insensitive comment about this horrific event. That coverage was at odds with fostering civil dialogue and being willing to listen to the points of view of those who have differing opinions. We should be able to disagree, robustly and passionately, but, ultimately, with respect. We need to do better.
Charlie Kirk believed that "when people stop talking, really bad stuff starts." Regardless of whether you agreed with his political views, his words and actions underscore the urgency to maintain a respectful exchange of ideas a principle we must champion. We believe in the power of communication to bring us together. Today, that belief feels more vital than ever. Something essential has fractured in our public discourse, and as a company that values the power of information, we have a responsibility to help mend it.
As employees, we ask you to embody our values in your work and communities. We should engage with respect, listen, and treat people with kindness.
Apple is still trying to make its own chatbot for Siri, because Apple Intelligence sorta sucks.
Chatbots give answers that are almost right — then they hallucinate some nonsense, Siri does something stupid, and the owner gets annoyed. But chatbot answers tend to be reality-but-wrong, not completely detached. Wikipedia gets a high weight in the training data, for instance. The bots don’t start at wild-arsed conspiracy theories.
It can even be hard to force the bots. Elon Musk got annoyed at Grok not going along with conservative conspiracy theories. He did a whole “anti-woke” training run on Grok in February, but Grok still gave fact-based replies to the conspiracy theories. Eventually Musk forced a clumsy prompt into Grok promoting the neo-Nazi conspiracy theory of a white genocide in South Africa. Then there was the time he made Grok say it was “mecha-Hitler” for a day. [Business Insider, archive; Atlantic]
The Trump administration also has strong ideas on chatbots. The executive order “Preventing Woke AI In The Federal Government” is not happy with the state of AI. [White House]
“Woke” is originally an American black culture word meaning “aware of systemic racism.” It still means the same thing for the conspiracy theorists, but they think that’s bad. It’s one in a series of snarl words — “political correctness”, then “SJW”, “cultural Marxism”, “woke”, and the latest is “DEI”. The conspiracy theorists keep changing the snarl word when it gets too obvious they’re just trying to make being against racism sound bad again.
So “Woke” and “DEI” are both in the executive order as unacceptable. The AI’s gotta get more racist!
Apple was, of course, already complying in advance. Politico got leaked copies of Apple’s guidelines to annotators at their subcontractor Transperfect from late 2024 and March 2025. [Politico]
The 2024 guidelines mentioned “intolerance” and “systemic racism” as bad things to flag The 2025 document removes both, instead marking “Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion” as a “controversial” topic
Other “controversial” topics include “elections” and “vaccines”! As it happens, health secretary Robert F. Kennedy is a germ theory denialist. Instead, Kennedy believes the miasma theory of disease, and so he’s trying to shut down all the vaccines he can. [The Week]
Apple changed its training a few months before the executive order on “woke” — but Tim Cook of Apple is effusively willing to bow to Trump, and this change by Apple did attempt to anticipate the administration’s ideas. [Wired]
Transperfect, Apple’s subcontractor, told Politico “these claims are completely false, and we deny them in the strongest possible terms” — though they didn’t say which claims, and Politico has the documents. Apple told Politico, “Claims that we’ve shifted this approach or policy are completely false” — despite, again, the documents.
Apple hopes it can release the new Siri chatbot in 2026. You can look forward to Siri telling you all about why you need a bit more racism in your life, and why your kids dying of measles is your proud and patriotic duty. It’s your own fault, you should have balanced their humours better.
While the Broligarch Neros play their fiddles.