Fuck You, Conan

No, I'm not going to write anything lengthy on this because I already have. Many, many times, it seems, but certainly recently.

Here's the official word from late night TV authority Bill Carter over at the Times:

"'The Tonight Show' will begin a new era in February when Jimmy Fallon succeeds Jay Leno as host of the most storied and successful program in late-night television.

NBC plans to announce on Wednesday its plan to install Mr. Fallon as the show’s sixth host at the conclusion of the network’s coverage of the 2014 Winter Olympics from Sochi, Russia. NBC also is to confirm reports that it plans to shake up the axes of the television industry by moving the show from its longtime home in Los Angeles to its birthplace, New York.

The announcement comes after weeks of news media reports that the changes were imminent and speculation about behind-the-scenes friction between NBC and Mr. Leno. Tensions between the two stretch back to Mr. Leno’s first departure from “Tonight” in 2009 and the tumultuous transition to Conan O’Brien that followed. That move ended with Mr. O’Brien leaving the network after eight months on the show and Mr. Leno resuming his role as host.

But Mr. Leno said in an interview: 'The main difference between this and the other time is I’m part of the process. The last time the decision was made without me. I came into work one day and — you’re out.' This time around 'there really aren’t any complications like there were the last time,' he added. 'This time it feels right.'"

There's no reason to hammer Leno any more than he's already been hammered, but suffice it to say that there's one problem with his assessment of the situation: It doesn't allow for that inevitable pang that he's going to feel as the time of the transition gets closer. Leno lives for the job. He always has. I guarantee you he can't imagine a life in which he wasn't waking up and going to work at Tonight every morning before the rest of the staff has even arrived. It's just who he is.

Granted, he could certainly tour to satisfy that inexhaustible work jones, but there's always the possibility that he could, at the last minute, begin talking to another network about a show in competition with NBC. No one's saying anyone would go after Jay hardcore at this point in his career, but it's not out of the question. I'm betting that, despite their regular demonstrations of mind-boggling incompetence, NBC's upper managers have already made Leno sign a non-compete, just to cover their asses.

Anyway, there's always the possibility that this is a "here we go again," but I think everyone's just sick as hell of that by now, including Leno himself. As for Fallon, he's the ultimate NBC lapdog, so I can't see him doing anything at all to screw this up -- including getting himself involved in any kind of resulting drama.

Zero Dark 30 Rock

Today's Daily Banter column expands on yesterday's admittedly pissed-off piece taking aim at NBC's decision to go with an interview with Jerry Sandusky that it didn't even shoot.

Here's the opening shot:

"It probably seems like I write quite a bit about NBC and its problems. In fact, I do, and there’s a reason for this. I spent a good portion of my career in television news working for NBC, at both the national and local level, and that time with the network always represented one of the proudest accomplishments of my life in the business. It’s easy to pick on, say, Fox News over and over again; with the exception of my good friend and former coworker Shep Smith, the place is generally a wasteland of lunacy and nonsense. But I expect more from NBC and always have. I know what the network is capable of, what its reputation has meant, and what those who worked under its banner years ago expected of themselves and the product they created. NBC, as far as I’m concerned — and I know there are plenty of others who feel the same way and would tell you the same thing — used to be the top of the heap in broadcasting and to work there was an unqualified honor. That was then, anyway. Now? Now I have no idea what the hell is going on at the network. It’s nothing short of shameful to see how far NBC has fallen — how far it’s been allowed to fall by those whose job it is to steward its good name."

Read the Rest Here

Bend Over

A special Sunday column for the Daily Banter takes aim at NBC's inexcusable decision to air an interview with Jerry Sandusky on tomorrow morning's Today show. An interview like this would normally be questionable, but the details of this particular interview make it completely outrageous for a responsible news organization to get anywhere near.

Here's the opening shot:

"I was going to save this for tomorrow’s column and actually may still have something to say about it after the segment in question airs in the morning. But in the desperate hope that somebody at NBC News might listen and put the brakes on what could very well be the biggest betrayal of its journalistic integrity since its repugnant and indefensible decision to air the Virginia Tech Killer’s posthumous manifesto, I figure it’s worth at least getting this into the ether.

You can’t do this, NBC. You just can’t do this."

Read the Rest Here

Peacock-up

Let me explain to you what's going on at NBC right now: A bunch of frazzled assholes in expensive suits are crowded into an office at 30 Rock trying to figure out how to put Justin Timberlake in every single show in the NBC lineup. (They already managed to get him to do an entire week with Fallon, what the show oh-so-cleverly called "Timberweek.")

The Huffington Post: NBC Ratings Sink Even Lower, Post Lowest Prime Time in Network History/3.12.13

By the way, read the above story and notice something interesting: despite NBC sucking wind just about across the board, Brian Williams's Nightly News still pulls in an average of nine million viewers a night. This is important to keep in mind because whenever anyone tells you network news is dead, or, worse, that Fox News dominates the conventional wisdom of television news these days, they're talking out of their ass. On a great night for, say, O'Reilly, he'll maybe grab about 2.5 million viewers -- across the entire country. In the great scheme of things that's not that big a deal. Williams and his network news contemporaries can triple that number in their sleep.

To the Matt-resses

Today's Daily Banter column takes a look at how Matt Lauer is blaming NBC for the colossal Ann Curry fuck-up -- and how the network is letting him do it.

Here's the opening shot:

"Jesus, how desperate is NBC to save the Today show? Desperate enough to let Matt Lauer publicly scold them for screwing up the firing of Ann Curry.

It was just four months ago that then-Today executive producer Jim Bell essentially pleaded with the public not to blame Lauer for the ugly debacle that was Ann Curry’s dismissal. At the time, the hope was that by taking the bullet for both the host and the network Bell would stave off the relentless negative publicity that was being heaped on Lauer and the show, publicity which had gotten so awful that Lauer, the once-beloved Today show host, was being confronted on the street and yelled at by average people for being a smug, imperious prick. Today’s ratings plummeted and Lauer was suddenly a cultural pariah."

Read the Rest Here

Now Barely Conscious

A couple of weeks ago, New York Magazine's Vulture section published a pretty good little piece asking whether NBC had passed the point of no return when it comes to ratings. The gist of it was that with all the damage Jeff Zucker, Ben Silverman and the rest of the staggeringly incompetent NBC entertainment brass did during the first decade of the new millennium, not just programming failure after failure but ignoring shows that could have been nurtured into a solid foundation for the network, NBC may not ever be able to fully recover.

Now it's true that the TV business is much like the movie business in the sense that, as William Goldman famously said, nobody knows nothin'. But it's not crazy to look at the massive shift in viewing habits and the growing dominance of cable, subscription and DVRd TV entertainment and understand that clawing its way back to the light might not just be difficult for NBC -- it may be damn near impossible. Things are only going to get worse the the major broadcast networks, and NBC is now so deep in the hole that it may never be able to fully get out and stay out.

The Vulture article starts with this line: "It's impossible to exaggerate just how bad a 2013 NBC is having."

That was two weeks ago.

And NBC's year just got much, much worse.

Read it and weep.

The Huffington Post: NBC Falls To Fifth Place, Behind Univision/2.21.13

Capus and Trade

You know, I have to admit that I've been watching Jeff Zucker's considerable behind-the-scenes moves at CNN with some fascination. It's pretty well established by now that I think Zucker's a narcissistic prick and a destroyer-of-worlds when it comes to television; his tenure at NBC wasn't just disastrous, it practically brought 30 Rock to its knees in terms of ratings, reputation and respectability. But since taking the reins at CNN, he's demonstrated that he might actually be interested in honoring the network's legacy by restoring it to hard-news greatness. Hiring Jake Tapper was a terrific move -- as was excising CNN's stable of highly paid pundits -- and potentially casting Chris Cuomo for an upcoming morning show shows promise. (Even the decision to possibly pair Cuomo with Erin Burnett would likely dull the latter's edges by making her little more than a pretty newsreader instead of somebody misguidedly led to believe that her opinion, forged by years of blowing Goldman Sachs partners, actually matters.)

But alas, it was only a matter of time before Zucker showed his true colors and made a change at CNN so significant that it had the potential to entirely, negatively impact the direction the network's news department will take moving forward. And so comes word from Reuters that Zucker is considering hiring NBC's departing news president, Steve Capus, and putting him in a position of authority at CNN.

First the good news: After a disastrous eight years in terms of credibility, Steve Capus is finally leaving NBC News. His greatest hits while at NBC include firing Don Imus for a relatively inconsequential on-air comment then, not long after, airing the final videotaped manifesto of Virginia Tech killer Seung Hui Cho (the message seeming to be that insulting college kids on NBC gets you fired while killing a whole bunch gets you all the time you'd like to say whatever's on your mind); agreeing to pay Paris Hilton a million dollars for a post-jail interview (before being called out for it); publicly blaming the media for all the attention NBC's calamitous handling of the Conan O'Brien-Jay Leno affair received, and generally playing Salacious Crumb to Zucker's Jabba the Hutt at just about every turn.

It's sad, though not surprising considering the current corporate media climate, that it took the Today show's plummeting ratings and instantly legendary PR clusterfuck in the wake of Ann Curry's clumsy dismissal -- oh yeah, and Capus presided over that as well -- to finally force Steve Capus out at NBC, but that's exactly what's happened. Comcast began cleaning house as soon as it took over -- in a deal that Zucker's incompetence almost cratered -- and now it looks as if the lack of favors they did themselves along the way has led to most of Zucker's team being just about gone.

The questions is, will these people now resurface at CNN?

Because, you know, they were so effective at NBC -- the once-dominant network that Zucker and company unfathomably took to number four thanks to their collective ego juggernaut.

Bound by Flaw

Today's column for the Daily Banter takes a look at the ongoing unholy alliance between NBC and Donald Trump.

Here's the opening shot:

"The quote of the day comes to us from NBC chief Bob Greenblatt, who said at this past weekend’s Television Critics Association conference: 'We talked him out of running for president. Wasn’t that good enough?'

The “he” Greenblatt is talking about is Donald Trump — pompous buffoon, national punchline and incessant self-promoting fabulist — and the quote comes from a question Greenblatt fielded about whether he and NBC had ever asked Trump to tone down his powerfully stupid political bluster and if the ongoing embarrassment Trump is causing himself might put his job with the network at risk. Greenblatt goes on to say, however, that 'if he becomes somehow hurtful and says or does things that cross a line, we would figure out what to do with that.' This leaves you wondering, considering all the vitriolic nonsense and relentless attempts to bully the President of the United States that Trump has been responsible for and has actually reveled in over the past couple of years, exactly what would cross the line in Greenblatt’s eyes. I’m guessing he’d have to gut a peacock and personally call Greenblatt a wicked Jew who controls the media on a live finale episode of Celebrity Apprentice to finally get kicked off the air."

Read the Rest Here

It's All Downhill from Here

Today's column for the Daily Banter takes a look at the ways in which Jeff Zucker may already be working his magic at CNN.

Here's the opening shot:

"First there was the news that may have come as a surprise to most reasonable people, but which honestly was all-but-assured to those who understand how the corporate world works: the hiring of Jeff Zucker as the new head of CNN Worldwide. Sure, pretty much everyone with a pair of eyes knew that Zucker had almost singlehandedly ruined NBC and by all accounts should’ve been radioactive for the next century or so, yet anybody experienced in dealing with modern American corporatism knows that there’s a mob-style 'blood in, blood out' thing that happens at the upper echelons of power and once you’ve been accepted into the club, with a few exceptions, you’re there to stay. Zucker has name-recognition and an adeptness at personal PR that borders on sorcery when you consider everything he manages to get people to conveniently forget about him, so the thoroughly offensive decision to give him another shot at running a television network was a punch telegraphed from a mile away."

Read the Rest Here

Like a Boss

Yes, I know -- Jeff Zucker was just named president of CNN worldwide.

The thing is, there's no sense in my banging out anything new on this subject because I actually wrote about it a few months ago, when Zucker's name first came up as a possible replacement for the departing Jim Walton. It was then that I made all the points you'd probably expect, the ones that if you have even a cursory understanding of network television and news in particular you're probably making yourself right about now.

So with that in mind, I think the only thing left to do before reposting that column from this past June is to introduce you to the one person who not only thinks that Zucker's latest "fail upward" will be good for CNN, he thinks it's a stroke of pure Five Diamond brilliance that will align the stars and bring the favor of the gods down upon Atlanta. Because Zucker is, you know, a genius.

In his regular column today, long-time Baltimore Sun TV critic David Zurawik calls the hiring of Zucker a "wise and winning" move right off the bat -- and then gets more and more detached from the reality you and I exist in as he goes along.

A few choice excerpts:

"Of all the major executive, talent and programming moves that CNN has made in the last few years, the expected announcement of Jeff Zucker as the president of CNN Worldwide looks like one of the best."

"Zucker's record, from his long and winning stint at NBC's Today, to the sound and classy syndicated production he built for Katie Couric, shows that he knows how to make money without shredding standards."

"Zucker is also steady, credible and tough. CNN needs all that right now in a president. You can bet Zucker, who is hardly press-shy, won't let the PR departments at other cable channels shape media reporters' perceptions of CNN as they do now without hitting back."

Okay, so was Zurawik a guest of honor at Zucker's kid's bar mitzvah or something? That little assessment of Zucker's abilities and history goes beyond glowing into the realm of hagiographically hallucinatory. I don't need to remind you of what really happened at NBC under Zucker's now infamous stewardship because I've done so many, many times and besides you can read about it anywhere.

A few choice details just for the hell of it: Zucker took NBC from #1 to a dismal #4 and made it a global punchline. He gave us Ben Silverman and Donald Trump. He lost NBC a billion dollars in ad revenue in one year. He was personally behind one of the most embarrassing prime-time clusterfucks in broadcast television history, that being the Jay Leno-Conan O'Brien debacle. He was unceremoniously fired in the wake of the multi-million-dollar merger he almost singlehandedly scuttled. Four words: To Catch a Predator.

The one thing Zucker's good at, as Zurawik alluded to, is creating his own mythology through a relentless personal PR campaign to other outlets -- and it's served him very well. I'd love to believe that Zucker will do right by CNN and finally bring the network back to life. Unfortunately, there's just one problem: his proven record so far.

Adding: This ringing endorsement...



I rest my case.

"Welcome Back Zucker" (Originally Published, 6.12.12)

Here’s a little something just about everyone in the television business knows: Once you become a high-powered executive, it’s almost impossible to fuck yourself and your reputation so badly that you’ll never work again.

Let’s say you’re some poor mid-level schmuck, doing whatever it is you do right now for a living, and you almost single-handedly make, let’s say, some gargantuan mistake that turns your company into a worldwide laughingstock and threatens to crater an upcoming multi-million dollar merger that’s going to make it the most powerful organization of its kind in the world — there’s a pretty good chance you’ll be radioactive for about the next hundred or so years. Not in television, though — and not if you’re an executive.

Case in point: Jeff Zucker, the former boy wonder of NBC Universal whose breathtaking arrogance and bottomless reservoir of short-sighted quick fixes and dumb-ass gimmickry turned the once-mighty NBC into a perennial last-place loser and whose name became synonymous with epic failure. It was Zucker who was personally responsible for the now legendary clusterfuck that turned NBC’s prime time inside out, led to an affiliate rebellion and eventually culminated in the ugly public departure of Conan O’Brien, all in the name of keeping Jay Leno fat, happy and, most importantly, safely in place at the network. Zucker ultimately left NBC in disgrace, but the important thing to remember is that disgrace is a stench that washes off damn quickly in the amoral world of the television suit.

Zucker’s got name recognition. And he’s got a reputation for putting clever ways of bringing in revenue above actually putting decent programming on the air — and that’s really all anybody cares about anymore in TV. Which is why his name is apparently now being bandied about as a possible candidate for not one but two stratospheric television news positions. Turner President Phil Kent is reportedly considering Zucker as a replacement for CNN Worldwide CEO Jim Walton, whose contract is up in December; Walton’s renewal is on very shaky ground in the wake of an almost staggering drought of ratings, with CNN pulling in record low numbers for months now. Meanwhile, Tribune Co. might also be considering Zucker to help lead the company out of its own wasteland, one brought on by a 2008 Chapter 11 filing that it’s now trying to emerge from.

Actually, the Tribune job would at least make a minor amount of sense given that Zucker’s forte is conjuring short-lived financial success out of thin air through the implementation of all kinds of silly schemes, cheap on-air trickery and relentless cross-pollination. But when it comes to CNN, here’s the thing: The network is already making money. In fact — it’s still turning an impressive profit even as its ratings tank. CNN could easily not worry one bit about how many people are watching it because it’s feeding off plenty of healthy revenue streams besides the traditional ones cultivated by good ratings. Obviously, though, CNN has a reputation to uphold and being the number three cable news network doesn’t exactly jibe with how it’s been perceived in the past and how it would like to be perceived now and going forward — but bringing somebody like Zucker on board to try to bring in those ratings seems more than a little misguided.

Either way, it looks like we haven’t seen the last of Jeff Zucker. You could’ve predicted from the beginning that there would always be somebody willing to put his special brand of spoiled milk back in the refrigerator in the hope that it’d taste better later. That’s just how things work in corporate television.

Flipping the Bird

Today's column for the Daily Banter deals with a recent story from the Associated Press that details how the Today show is losing viewers in droves. My take: the exodus is the long-overdue comeuppance for a network that's relentlessly pummeled its talent and audience over the past few years, believing it could always get away with it.

Here's an excerpt:

"I admit that there were several times that I truly thought NBC would suffer immediate audience blowback for its sins, but strangely it never really did; yes, there was some bad press from the likes of me and other more prominent media critics, but in the end business went on as usual for the peacock. And I think ultimately that’s what emboldened the executive assholes at NBC: Each time they did something inexcusable and didn’t face the instant wrath of the viewing public — the kind of outrage that threatened their bottom line — they simply smirked and moved on, believing they were bulletproof and that nothing they did could permanently damage the NBC brand."

Read the Rest Here

Fuck You, NBC

I'm trying to figure out how NBC could possibly become more of a joke. I'm trying, but I can't say anything's coming to me.

In case all of its well-documented failures in the past weren't enough to convince you that the network, particularly its news department, is being run by monkeys, there's this: This morning, rather than go with the 9/11 moment of silence at 8:46AM, the Today show -- seriously the biggest punchline within the larger farce that is NBC -- decided to continue airing an interview with Kris Jenner in which she discussed the new season of the case of cultural Ebola that is Keeping Up with the Kardashians and her breast implants.

And no, I'm not making any of this up.

I wish I could come up with something clever or funny to say about choosing Kris Jenner over the 9/11 moment of silence, but really all I've got is -- fuck you, NBC. Just fuck you.

Quote(s) of the Day

"At least in the glory-days of welfare-bashing, the attacks had some grounding in reality -- the system had grown rapidly and was in need of some sort of reform. Now, at a time of drastically reduced welfare rolls, the attack is utterly unfounded. And Romney just keeps using it, at stop after stop, in ad after ad. How can this be possible? Well, maybe because very few of my colleagues in the press seem all that troubled by it. Unless I’ve missed it, none of the national papers or networks or Buzzfeeders have done a comprehensive report on Romney’s persistence in playing the welfare card. It’s as if it was enough to have the factcheckers offer their initial scolding, but after that, hey, anything goes. I saw no mention in dispatches from yesterday of Romney’s successful use of the welfare line in Beallsville -- instead, the stories were dominated by Romney’s declaration of outrage, later in the day, over Obama’s campaign of 'anger and hate.' ... A psychoanalyst might see in Romney’s outrage over campaign excess more than a little Freudian projection. But a smart political analyst would settle for the more mundane explanation that Romney is seeking to distract attention from his own very effective and mendacious offensive with welfare."

-- The New Republic's Alec MacGillis, wondering why so few in the media are calling out Mitt Romney on his ongoing bald-faced lie that President Obama is "gutting" the welfare system by removing the work requirement

"Wait a minute... I can’t let that go... You leveled a charge about the welfare work requirement. It turns out that’s not true. Where did you get your information? ... Nothing about this issue, every charge that has been leveled about this welfare reform order that the president signed, every accusation that has been leveled by some Republicans have been proven to be not true."

-- NBC's Chuck Todd, apparently getting the message

Todd's comment came just a little while ago during an interview with Terry Branstad, Iowa's Republican governor, after Branstad repeated the bogus welfare charge. Having been thoroughly chastised for saying something that simply wasn't true, what did the governor do? He said it was. He said Obama did remove the work requirement from welfare. He lied. Again and again. This is what it's come to: The truth doesn't even matter anymore -- all that matters is that people believe the lie and that political mileage can be gotten out of it.

For those keeping score, I've now been able to post two examples in just one day of the Romney campaign pushing accusations that aren't the least bit true. And remember that Steve Benen over at MSNBC continues to keep a weekly tally of all the lies Romney and his surrogates tell. These people are completely fucking shameless.

The D-Enlist

Today's column for the Daily Banter has to do with NBC's monumentally dumb new reality show, Stars Earn Stripes. It's drawing quite a bit of wrath from the left, most notably from nine Nobel Peace Laureates -- and Glenn Greenwald.

Here's an excerpt:

"There’s no doubt that not only is Stars Earn Stripes an almost laugh-out-loud stupid show — one that’s disingenuous on every level, from its sanitized portrayal of armed combat, to its contention that it has only the best pro-troops intentions at heart, to its willingness to call Nick Lachey and Todd Palin 'stars' — but its premise is indeed more than a little tawdry. I’m not outright offended by the show, but I can certainly see how some people would be: It casts what our military does in terms of an athletic competition, without any of the nasty little business of killing a lot of people. I’m not going to play the left-wing moral relativist card simply because I accept that, while our military doesn’t always do the right thing — and certainly if you put moral people in highly immoral situations and leave them there for too long, they’re going to crack — for the most part our troops are incredibly honorable people and do, in fact, deserve our respect and admiration."

Read the Rest Here

The Hunger Games

Today's piece for the Daily Banter takes a look at the games going on behind the Olympic games coverage at NBC -- namely the controversy over whether Savannah Guthrie's Today show co-hosting job is already in jeopardy.

Here's the opening shot:

"I used to have a motto that I lived by when it came to the notion of job security in the TV news business -- it's one I'd pass along to the various rising stars coming up through the ranks whenever the winds of change were gathering in the corner offices of the newsroom: Management is always behind you 100% -- right up until the second they suddenly put their hand against your back and push you out the door. It pretty much goes without saying that no matter the field you work in, you can't put absolute faith in corporate's absolute faith in you, but in mainstream television news that's a fact you have to always keep in the front of your mind or risk being blindsided at the worst possible moment..."

Read the Rest Here

Assistant Quote of the Day

"I've emailed them back and my position is, I've read their rules, I’ve reread their rules. I still don’t understand how I broke them. I think they’re making up their rules as they go along frankly."

-- Journalist Guy Adams of the Independent, commenting on Twitter's decision to suspend his account over a negative tweet aimed at NBC and its coverage of the Olympics

Here's what happened: Adams tweeted the e-mail address of Gary Zenkel, the head of NBC's Olympics coverage, last Friday, suggesting that people write him to complain. NBC of course filed a formal complaint with Twitter -- so Twitter suspended Adams's account, claiming that Adams had violated its privacy policy. Thing is, Twitter is an official partner of NBC's Olympics coverage. Are you starting to see where things stink here?

Adams's Twitter feed has now been reinstated with both NBC and Twitter's apologies, but not only does this little incident highlight the danger of the titanium-hulled corporate synergy which Comcast NBC Universal has become legendary for, it proves that NBC still doesn't understand how social media works. The network doesn't get that as a giant media organization, it can't simply flirt with social networking platforms and expect to control how much or little of itself is rendered transparent because of it. It's all or nothing. Either you accept that you pretty much have no privacy by submitting to new media or you close yourself off completely (and even that won't really work anymore). It's staggering how willfully blind these organizations continue to be -- how stuck they are in a mindset that's thoroughly obsolete.

Quote of the Day

"If you’ve been watching NBC in prime time the past few nights, you’ve probably noticed how, night in, night out, we’ve been wrecking the Olympics for you. All we can say is, our bad. At NBC we’re just not used to broadcasting things that people want to watch."

-- Andy Borowitz, in "A Message From NBC About Its Olympics Coverage"

There's gonna be a lot of NBC bashing around here over the next 15 or so hours, so prepare yourself.

If you'd like, there are other outlets that will happily stream it for you for live -- or you can just wait til I post it here in prime time long after everyone else has seen it and knows how it ends.

Quote of the Day

"We gave her a year to prove herself, and ultimately we came to the conclusion that she had played at the highest level she could. When you’re in the major leagues of our profession, you’ve got to continue to be at peak performance in order to stay there."

-- NBC News President Steve Capus on the network's decision to push Ann Curry out of the Today show after fifteen years, with less than a year on the anchor desk

Every time I think NBC in general and Capus in particular can no longer surprise me with their almost sociopathic incompetence and lack of anything approaching journalistic or business ethics, they find new depths to the proverbial barrel. It's bad enough to promote someone to a position you had to know she wasn't right for -- given that she'd been on your staff for fourteen years -- understanding that you'd be willing to embarrass yourself by letting her go quickly if she didn't in fact measure up. But to then turn around and publicly trash that person when she remains an employee within your company -- and make no mistake, that's exactly what Capus is doing here -- shows an utter lack of class and takes an astonishing amount of management hubris. I can't think of a time when it was considered acceptable, to say nothing of civilized, for an executive within a company to insult one of his or her loyal employees and to officially blame the victim when a crappy management decision blows up in everyone's face.

But we've seen this before from the near-magnificent assholes at NBC. We watched both Jeff Zucker and Dick Ebersol have the unmitigated gall to privately and publicly beat up on Conan O'Brien and blame him for the situation which led to his being ousted from The Tonight Show. And as for Capus, he was behind a journalistic decision so immoral, reprehensible and obscene that it marks an untouched low-point in network news ethics: the decision to air the final videotaped manifesto of Virginia Tech killer Seung-Hui Cho.

That incident inspired one of the most viciously indignant screeds to ever appear on this site. And it's why almost nothing NBC does, no matter how stupid, irresponsible or just plain wrong, can truly shock me anymore.

"The Tapes of Wrath" (Originally Published, 4.20.07)

"The only difference between suicide and martyrdom is press coverage."

-- Chuck Palahniuk

I want my soul back.

Over the years, the television news business has made me feel many ways -- exhilarated, proud, honored, embarrassed, enlightened, trivial, angry, frustrated, even ashamed on more than one occasion. It has never, however, made me feel dirty -- until now.

This overwhelming need that I have at the moment to crawl into a shower and desperately attempt to rinse the corruption and sickness off of my skin stems from one simple fact: the images that are currently plastered all over every television network and newspaper in America -- the photos and homemade video of Virginia Tech killer Seung-Hui Cho -- should never have seen the light of day. Neither you, nor I, nor the families of the victims, nor anyone aside from FBI investigators should have ever laid eyes on any of it.

I'm well aware that there are some who would consider this a dereliction of duty on my part, an abandonment of my unspoken vow to dispassionately satisfy the public's insatiable right to know, no matter the cost or consequence.

You know something? I couldn't fucking care less.

On Wednesday afternoon, NBC News made a decision that, if there's any justice in the universe whatsoever, will be remembered as the singular event that obliterated its once-hallowed reputation, got its smug, hypocritical prick of a president Steve Capus deported to a deserted island and brought 30 Rock crashing to the ground.

Through a thought process that I can't even begin to comprehend, nor would I even wish to be able to, NBC chose to give a final posthumous forum to the psychotic, self-obsessed and thoroughly delusional kid who took thirty-two innocent lives out of some ridiculously inflated sense of aggrievement for a supposed lifetime of persecution. The network's news executives put prurience ahead of prudence and in doing so rubbed the faces of the victims' families into the very dirt used to bury their loved ones; they did it by seeing to it that everywhere those families turned, they would stare into the same cold eyes that their terrified sons, daughters, sisters, brothers, husbands and wives saw the instant before they died.

Understand, as a veteran of this business I've always been of the opinion that news must be taken at face value, that the potential fallout, positive or negative, from running a legitimate story should rarely, if ever, be taken into account when deciding whether or not to go to air with that story. I've sat in meeting after meeting in which the news value of an item was weighed against its potential impact. I've listened to executive after executive rationalize the choice to run a questionable news item in the hope of hiding from others and possibly even themselves the tawdriness of their true motives. I've done it myself on more than one occasion.

I can tell you, without fear of contradiction, that this is exactly what Capus and company did on Wednesday when presented with a story, the spectacular sensationalism of which was matched only by its complete lack of any real value to the public. NBC's news department heads received a gift from the gods, via the mail, and they'd be damned if they weren't going to run with it no matter what kind of moral somersaults they might have to perform to justify the decision.

So run with it they did, splashing Seung-Hui Cho's contorted face and idiotic ramblings across the airwaves with all the subtlety of gang-bang porn.

As if on cue from the network's PR department, Steve Capus himself took to NBC's airwaves soon after to assure America that he had personally wrestled long and hard with the leviathan ethical dilemma presented by such a story before valiantly pinning his conscience to the mat and forcing it to tap out. The hysterical irony was that it marked Capus's second such appearance on one of his own networks' news programs in two weeks: the last time was when he bombastically asserted the moral authority of himself and his network by dropping Don Imus, who had merely insulted, rather than gunned down a group of college students.

Let me repeat that in simpler terms: Make a cruel comment about a bunch of kids and you're not worthy to have a forum on NBC; stalk through the halls shooting kids in cold blood and NBC will give you all the time you'd like to speak your mind.

No matter the bullshit ethical loopholes Capus continues to try to squeeze through, one need only look at the video itself for NBC's true motivation to become crystal clear. There, burned into the top left-hand corner of every frame of tape and every still image of Cho posing with his weapons of choice is the NBC News logo, complete with peacock. It's been put there as an almost juvenile -- given the subject matter -- assertion of ownership, a figurative tongue protruding in the direction of every news organization that NBC knew would fair-use the material.

It's the best and easiest form of promotion imaginable, promotion the network hopes will turn into ratings which will turn into dollars for NBC Universal shareholders and a big bonus for Capus.

And lest there be any lingering doubt that the network knew from the beginning that it was stepping over the line, Brian Williams basically admitted as much during a conversation with imbecilic talking-head Chris Matthews on MSNBC Wednesday night, saying that he was well aware that by airing even a portion of Cho's manifesto, NBC was bestowing upon the killer the martyrdom he had hoped to achieve. The reason he had killed -- the reason he had mailed the tape to a television network to begin with -- was because he wanted to be heard loud and clear and NBC was more than happy to oblige him that opportunity.

Satisfying the motives of a murderer should've been reason enough for NBC to refuse to air such an obscenely stupid diatribe. The only argument that can ever be made -- the one mitigating factor -- in favor of giving a killer what he wants is the threat of further violence, and Cho wasn't the Zodiac; he had already seen to it that he would never kill again.

The morning after the network made its contemptibly immoral decision -- one which opened the floodgates for every other news organization in the world to follow suit, as the genie was out of the bottle by that point -- the families of two of the shooting victims canceled their scheduled appearances on the Today show, citing a very understandable level of hurt and bitter outrage. Whether that was enough to hammer home the culpability of the network in the continued emotional torture of these poor people, who knows. It would be nice to believe, though, that behind the walls of 30 Rock and its bastard stepchild MSNBC -- the nicest warehouse in Secaucus, New Jersey -- someone somewhere was considering the throwing of himself upon a sword for the unforgivable crime of dishonoring what's always been a strictly above-the-board news operation.

I knew none of the victims personally and yet I grieve for them. As someone who's always allowed myself the comfort of detached analysis, and an occasional moral relativism which is the natural by-product of it, I don't often see subjects in terms of absolutes. Things are rarely black or white, right or wrong, good or evil; there's typically an abundance of gray area in between which demands to be taken into account.

Not this time.

I feel for the families of the victims. I feel for the victims themselves, all of whom were guilty of nothing more than waking up and going to class on an otherwise typical Monday morning. I imagine their terror when confronted with their cold and methodical executioner. I place the life of Max Turner against the life of Seung-Hui Cho -- what he chose to become -- and it's not even worthy of comparison; it's innocence versus guilt, life versus death. Not one of those thirty-two people deserved to die, certainly not at the whim of a craven fucking coward who needed to lock them all in and mercilessly gun them down to achieve whatever narcissistic sense of authority he felt life was denying him. Anyone who demands respect from behind a gun is spineless to begin with; a person who demands it from an unarmed kid who's cowering on the floor in front of him, begging for his or her life -- just before shooting that terrified kid three times -- is a worthless piece of shit.

Make no mistake: I would wink at the devil and gladly accept a lifetime in hell just for the sheer, unadulterated joy of having been able to take Seung-Hui Cho's skull and smash it against the concrete floor until there was nothing left of it.

Someone should've put a fucking bullet in that kid before he ever had the chance to destroy so many innocent lives.

I don't care what his twisted reasoning was or who had beat him up back in high school, there's simply no excuse for what he did.

Just like there's no excuse for complicity in the elevation of his act to the martrydom he had hoped it would be seen as by the next sociopathic kid with a gun and a grudge.

Believe me, that kid's already out there somewhere -- and he's thinking that he can kill thirty-three.

Sunday Smackdown

My latest piece for the Daily Banter is now up -- it deals with Rachel Maddow's deft smackdown of vaudevillian hack Alex Castellanos on Meet the Press this past weekend, and why we don't see more of that on network and cable television but should.

Here's the opening shot:

"In case you missed it, Rachel Maddow handed Alex Castellanos his ass this past Sunday morning. It happened on Meet the Press during a debate over whether the Republicans are currently engaged in a legislative 'war' on America’s women. While I’m not a big fan of calling what the GOP is doing an all-out war — only because I feel like that term has been run into the ground — there’s no doubt that what we’re seeing from the right at the moment is the latest fusillade in an ongoing push to turn back the clock to time when women were largely free to come and go as they pleased but were also fully aware of their place beneath the white guy power structure. They were often highly regarded, but their rights were still little more than the largess of the real people in charge — which is the definition of condescension."

Read the Rest Here

Gone but Not Forgotten: The Reckoning

Really quickly because I'm just about finished with my project and am pretty much gun-to-head eager to get it wrapped.

Turns out the "Miami producer" who got fired by NBC for botching the Trayvon Martin 911 tape was a WTVJ reporter named Jeff Burnside -- that's according to a website that follows South Florida news closely. I did work with Burnside years ago, back when he was actually nothing more than a lowly pawn in the producer ranks; he's a decent enough guy, although I can't say that I've been a big fan of his reporting from what I've seen of it in my time back in Miami over the past few years. It's not that he does a bad job -- he's just a little dull, but in a market like South Florida there's an argument to be made that at least that's better than looking like he's planning to go directly from his live shot to the velvet rope of the Gansevoort at 1:30AM.

Apparently it was Burnside -- remember, a local news reporter -- who made the bad edit that ended up all the way in 30 Rock on the Today show. He and the actual NBC staffer who shepherded the clip to New York without checking it were both shown the door -- and I have to admit with good reason. They both screwed up big time.

Either way, just figured I'd satisfy all those who've written me over the past couple of weeks wondering if I knew who it was out of Miami who got canned over the Trayvon 911 tape debacle.

That internal investigation NBC ran to ensure that something like this doesn't happen again? Its first recommendation better have been: "Don't entrust your biggest, most delicate and potentially most inflammatory stories to some poor doof working in the ass end of the NBC TV-Stations Division."