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Michael Chace hadn’t seen it coming.
Before July 16, business was good for his publishing network company, Chace Media. In particular, its partnership with the news syndicator Microsoft Network had grown increasingly successful.
“We were doing over 600 million page views a month on MSN, which is substantial,” Chace told The Western Journal in a phone interview.
Then one day, MSN dropped the hammer, terminating its agreement with Chace Media without a legitimate explanation, Chace said.
The sudden termination ultimately brought him to one conclusion: This was about the conservative news content he had tried submitting.
Chace had worked with Microsoft as a licensor — MSN would license different genres of written content from him and then publish it on its platform.
His strategy was simple. Working as an intermediary, Chace advised media brands on how to adjust their content to fit MSN’s policies. Once adjusted, Chace would submit the brands to MSN, where a team of reviewers either accepted them, rejected them, or returned them for corrections, which were usually minor.
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“I don’t care what anyone’s view is, as long as it is brand-safe. It’s not my role to decide left versus right, or dogs versus cats,” Chace told The Western Journal.
It’s a formula that Chace had repeated many times since March 2024, when he started working with MSN.
“Over the last year, my publisher network grew significantly. We had, I think, 54 brands that were approved on MSN through my direct relationship,” Chace says.
During that same period, he said, MSN had also rejected more than 20 brands that Chace had sent over, which was just part of the process.
But everything changed when he submitted content from the Independent Journal Review and The Blaze, two conservative media outlets.
Chace knew something was wrong when he hadn’t received a fast response from MSN, as he usually did.
“There’s no defined timeline, but what they express is that typically it [takes] five business days to get a review. And so there was no feedback,” Chace says.
Eight weeks passed.
Concerned, he emailed his MSN contact on July 15, asking about the status of IJR and The Blaze; he had submitted them in a batch along with five other brands, which weren’t conservative.
The next morning, Microsoft sent him an email saying it was terminating its agreement with Chace Media. Not only that, but it also suspended the 54 brands it had already approved, Chace says.
Left without an explanation, he could only guess what had gone wrong.
“I haven’t been told that it was conservative news that triggered this, but when I look at it, it’s just kind of odd that there had been no change to what we were doing, or how the sites were operating, or who was approved on MSN,” he says.
MSN had rejected IJR and The Blaze once before, in December 2024, Chace said. But in the past, he had resubmitted formerly rejected brands, which MSN later approved. Re-submissions also weren’t prohibited in Microsoft’s publishing guidelines.
On July 16, Chace sent an email to MSN team leader Mark Oda. Eager to fix the situation, Chace even offered to fly out to Japan to meet Oda in person.
But Oda said the termination was final.
“Unfortunately, it has been determined that your brands/content do not fit our current direction and hence the suspension/termination of the account,” Oda wrote in a July 16 email.
The Western Journal reached out by phone and email to MSN about Chace’s allegations.
“We support more than 1,000 news brands that enable MSN to offer a variety of diverse perspectives,” an MSN spokeswoman wrote in an email to The Western Journal.
“In order to provide a trusted and engaging experience to our users, our partners are subject to our core professional publishing standards. When we become aware of instances that violate our policies, we take action to remove them as soon as possible,” the statement reads.
The company added that it doesn’t comment on individual partnerships.
MSN publishes some conservative brands on its platform, including The Western Journal and The Daily Caller.
The National Review and cable giant Fox News also have a presence on the website.
But besides IJR and The Blaze, other popular conservative sites are noticeably missing, such as Breitbart and The Daily Wire. The Western Journal reached out to both outlets regarding their relationship with MSN.
Meanwhile, left-leaning outlets are ubiquitous on the platform: The New York Times, The Atlantic, The Guardian, The Washington Post, The Nation, The Daily Beast, The Hill, CNN, MSNBC, and others.
As for Chace, he’s moving on without MSN.
“I feel that a better content ecosystem has all voices on it, and not just whatever the objective might be of a much larger company,” he told The Western Journal.
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