This is what I posted on the latest Conan post on the media decoder blog:
Since there are no comments on the Dick Ebersol article http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/15/business/media/15conan.html let me just say he is only compounding the damage to NBC. I didn't think NBC execs could make things any worse, but he certainly has. To say that Conan is failing in the ratings (on the same day NBC sent out a press release bragging about his ratings including the period before it because clear they were going to screw him over) because Leno won even when NBC's prime time wasn't doing well ignores a number of factors. First, Leno lost to Letterman until Hugh Grant's poor judgement gave him a boost. They haven't given Conan nearly as much time as they gave Leno. It is also a far different media landscape now where people have far more options if they aren't watching NBC because of Zucker's failed experiment with Leno. And while he wrongly says Conan failed, he doesn't admit that Leno failed. It is "chicken-hearted and gutless" to attack Conan and Letterman while saying they shouldn't make fun of Leno. As if Leno is an innocent bystander who has no history. And ignoring that it has resulted in some of the funniest jokes from all of the late night shows in a while. He also doesn't seem to remember that Letterman came from a city in the central time zone, Indianapolis (where I lived for 9 years & I was born in Chicago and lived in Iowa). And that many of us who came from the central time zone not only prefer Letterman and Conan (and we live in an era when we can watch both), but we dislike Leno. I actually watched the Jay Leno show for the first time on Tuesday and it was awful. Even his attempts to joke about the current disaster were bad. He wasn't funny at all. And the last horrid roundtable segment shows how good Bill Maher is and how bad Leno is. -- Steve Rhodes http://flickr.com/photos/ari/ photos http://twitter.com/tigerbeat
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