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.
“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.
Hellbound and Down 