Game On... and On and On and On

Today's piece for the Daily Banter has to do with the Olympics.

Don't care at all about the Olympics?

Tough -- you're gonna be inundated with them for the next two-and-a-half weeks whether you like it or not.

Read Here

Game Over

Well, say one thing for it -- Comcast may be creating a monster, but at least it's getting rid of quite a few monsters in the process.

First it was Zucker, now Ebersol and his leviathan ego.

Somewhere out there I get the impression Conan O'Brien is having his son baptized.

New York Magazine: Dick Ebersol Is a Casualty of Kabletown/5.19.11

Why Do You Think They Call It a "Network?"

Let's play another game of Six Degrees of Corporate Media Synergy.

Right now Dateline is interviewing Kristen Wiig and Maya Rudoph; they star in the new movie Bridesmaids; Bridesmaids was produced by Universal Studios; NBC Universal is the parent of NBC, which airs Saturday Night Live; Kristen Wiig and Maya Rudolph happen to be castmembers on Saturday Night Live; NBC Universal is also the parent of NBC News, which is essentially promoting both Bridesmaids and Saturday Night Live by doing a story on Kristen Wiig and Maya Rudolph.

And I'm watching the whole thing on Comcast cable.

But hey, now I just switched over to "The Alzheimer's Epidemic: A Larry King Special" on CNN -- and everything's all better.

Conflict Disinterest

I wish I had time to elaborate more on this but considering that I've devoted a good amount of copy both here and at the Huffington Post to beating the living crap out of NBC Universal for the shamelessly cross-promotional profit machine it's become, what you're about to see should come as no surprise at all.

This morning, the Today show's Meredith Vieira softballed NBC reality show star and perennial national punchline Donald Trump on both his bullshit flirtation with a run for the White House and his sudden rise to the position of King of the Birthers. She did this while trumpeting -- wait for it -- an NBC News/WSJ poll that supposedly puts Trump among the top GOP contenders for president should he choose to run once his fucking television show wraps this season.

You really have to see this circus-like nonsense to believe it -- not just because it's such an awesome display of personal and professional hubris on the part of both Trump and NBC as well as an almost unfathomable Möbius loop of meta-media self-promotion, but because it really does feel like it marks the nadir for a once-great and respected television network. Really, all that's missing is for Top Chef winner Richard Blais to be cooking for Trump on a GE stove while some guy from Comcast installs cable in the background.

WWJDD? (What Would Jack Donaghy Do?)

Time once again to remind everyone of this classic gem.

The Cable Guy

This isn't a surprise in the least -- although to be honest I was kind of pulling for Jack Donaghy.

The Huffington Post: Comcast CEO To Take Over for Zucker at NBC/9.26.10

The Downward Spiral

I rarely repost a piece within just a few months of its initial release on this site or at the Huffington Post, but this morning I want to republish the wrap I did on the whole Conan/NBC/Leno debacle from January for one important reason: The story is back in the headlines in a huge way, and once again the main players in this drama are taking sides and accusing each other of all sorts of malfeasance. Take for instance NBC, which is now claiming that Conan O'Brien lied during his 60 Minutes interview last Sunday night when he said that it would've cost the network more to buy out Leno than it would have to simply move him back to his old time slot and give the "new guy" the boot. It's amusing at face value that NBC management thinks anyone should trust anything it has to say at this point, given recent history, but there's no underestimating the effect that all that rarefied air at the top of the New York City skyline tends to have on what were once ostensibly just average guys in suits. That said, two things should never be forgotten: A) the original decision to move Leno to 10pm was never about producing quality or even ratings but was instead all about making money on an unbelievably dirt cheap show, and B) Unlike Conan, Leno was allowed to fail during his original run on The Tonight Show for years before he finally found his footing and turned into the unfunny and apparently indestructable juggernaut he is today. This piece, by the way, as it appeared at HuffPo, is generally the first thing that pops up if you Google my name -- which means, I guess, that somebody's been reading it.

"My City of Ruins" (Originally Published, 1.12.10)

Maybe it's time I made something clear.

Back when I was a cocky 23-year-old producer at WSVN in Miami, I was heavily courted by a guy named Don Browne who at the time was the general manager of NBC's owned and operated station in Miami, WTVJ. He badly wanted me to jump ship and become his 11pm producer and he was willing to blow big, billowing clouds of smoke up my ass to make it happen; among the compliments he lavished on me during one particular power lunch between the two of us was a claim that he saw in me the next Jeff Zucker. Now in 1993, Zucker was considered NBC's new boy wonder -- named executive producer of the Today Show at just 26-years-old. So even though I had basically stumbled into TV and had yet to take the entire industry the least bit seriously, I understood that a big-gun at NBC -- and Browne was a Jedi Master in the ways of the Peacock, having been the executive VP of news for NBC at one point -- mentioning me in the same breath as Zucker wasn't the kind of flattery you simply shrugged off. And I didn't -- even though I made the choice to stay at WSVN briefly before heading to Los Angeles to work for KCBS.

I say that I didn't shrug it off because I always kept Browne's praise in the back of my mind and in late 1997 when it became clear that I had allowed myself to become little more than comfortable in my discomfort at KCBS, I put out feelers to Don Browne -- who had expressed a genuine desire to keep in touch with me and promised to always take my call if I felt like I wanted to talk about my career, the business, whatever -- and sure enough, he welcomed the idea of making room for me at WTVJ. As it turned out, the station was going through a regime change, with another NBC wunderkind, 28-year-old Ramon Escobar, having just taken the reins as news director. Browne flew me to Miami, had me meet with everyone and made me an offer I honestly couldn't refuse -- which kind of befit his status as an intimidating Godfather within the NBC power structure.

I'll always be glad I made the decision to go to WTVJ, as it remains one of the best work experiences of my career -- the people there more like family than coworkers. The thing to keep in mind, though, is that one of Don Browne's major selling points during his attempt to draft me was that I wouldn't be working for just anyone -- I'd be working for NBC. To hammer that reality home, he even flew me to New York City to visit 30 Rock; sit in on the Today Show; make it crystal clear that I was going to be a part of something extraordinary. The entire experience was exhilarating -- and it marked the first time that I truly appreciated the career that I had stepped in by accident, the abilities that I had largely taken for granted up to that point.

Bottom line: I was proud to work at NBC. So proud in fact that I continued to work for the company when I moved back out to L.A. with the wife that I had met at WTVJ. So proud that I couldn't have been more thrilled that my shot at personal and professional rebirth and redemption in the wake of 9/11 came from MSNBC and my former news director, Ramon Escobar.

I can occasionally be a bit of a feisty pain in the ass as an employee -- I believe that most decent newspeople are -- but that doesn't mean that I didn't spend years thinking of NBC as my home. It was, to me at least, a shining beacon of terrific programming and rock solid journalism, and one that I felt honored to be a part of.

I bring this up because it should be obvious by now that I pick on NBC quite a bit in the stuff that I write here and at the Huffington Post. Many regular readers have noticed and even confronted me on the seemingly curious fact that I take aim at NBC Universal far more than I even do Fox News Channel.

So I guess I felt like it was time to explain myself: Call it tough love -- borne mostly out of sadness, frustration and, occasionally, outright anger.


Over the past few years, I've watched NBC go from being the network I believed was consistently devoted to excellence above every other consideration -- committed to the notion that, as Don Browne used to say, "First be best, then be first" -- to one that will sacrifice not just quality but any and all ethical considerations in a relentless pursuit of profit. Don't get me wrong, as a company NBC is in the business of making money and there's nothing at all wrong with that -- it just used to achieve that end by offering audiences the best programming and news coverage on television. It was best, which is why it was first, which is why it made money. But somewhere along the line network executives -- particularly and ironically Jeff Zucker, who was named CEO of NBC TV in 2005 and then CEO of the NBC Universal empire in 2007 -- decided that cash would be the only consideration, that it could be amassed without even earning it by means of great shows and a consistently above-the-board news operation at the highest levels of management, and that the rise of cable and non-traditional media provided the perfect excuse for making this kind of major paradigm shift. The shareholders likely thought Zucker was brilliant for expanding NBC's properties across several platforms then turning each into a giant promotional machine for the others until "NBC product placement" was all any NBC show or network was good for; for hiring a worthless, self-obsessed hack like Ben Silverman to dumb down prime time; for bringing in bags of money while slashing costs, culminating in the cynical for-profit-only ploy that put Jay Leno in prime time five nights a week. Unfortunately, while get-rich-quick schemes tend to work well in the short-term, they can be devastating long-term -- and Zucker's not so myopic that he shouldn't have realized this about the business model he'd adopted. There was no meat in the tasty-looking sandwich he was serving day after day, and with the collapse of the Leno show, the impending unceremonious exit of Conan O'Brien and the P.R. cataclysm both have caused for the network, almost everyone, maybe even the mighty shareholders looking down from Olympus, can now see that.

What's happened at NBC -- already a perennially anemic network -- over the past week has been, quite simply, one of the most shameful fiascoes in the history of modern broadcast television. We're talking one for the ages. Pushing out Leno to keep Conan O'Brien was questionable enough a move; giving Leno a prime time slot despite the threat of rebellion from the affiliates whose revenue stream you'd be damming up, just because it'd be a corporate cash cow, was worse; pulling the plug to save a giant deal with Comcast Cable was worse still. Now this: taking back the show that was given to Conan to keep him from jumping ship all to keep Leno from jumping ship -- forcing Conan to gracefully and humbly bow out because he refuses to tarnish the good name of a legendary NBC brand, one that NBC itself apparently has no compunction about making radioactive. It's breathtaking, sociopathic incompetence. It doesn't even make good business sense because, once again, the short-term fears of the twitchiest suits might be salved -- Leno's deadly show at 10pm is six feet under and Conan's underperforming stint on The Tonight Show is cut short -- but the chilling effect that this will have not only on audiences but on any young talent from which you might hope to cultivate loyalty is utterly decimated. Why should anyone trust anything an NBC executive says from here on out?

This is the problem NBC Entertainment Chief Jeff Gaspin is facing right now as he tries to clean up the mess and duck the fire caused by the spectacular implosion of NBC's 10pm and late night lineup (to say nothing of what was left of the network's tattered reputation) and the exit of one of its marquee talents -- the disaster that "boy wonder" Jeff Zucker essentially created. And where is Zucker while all this is going on -- while Gaspin's head is in the crosshairs? Who knows. He hasn't made a public appearance or granted an interview since the crap started rolling downhill last week; I'd like to think that he's in a bunker somewhere honorably falling on his sword, but given that his contract was just bafflingly renewed for another three years, that seems an unlikely scenario. Make no mistake, though -- that's exactly what needs to happen.

I'm willing to concede that Jeff Zucker's meteoric rise was made possible only by his seemingly bottomless reservoir of creative short-term fixes for whatever problems he was confronting at any particular moment, and that the shareholders had demanded that he cut costs and increase profits. But a willingness to take potentially profitable gambles, while admirable, comes with an inherent risk: Somebody needs to pay when a poorly thought-out experiment -- a shockingly obvious "quick fix" -- fails to the tune of millions of dollars, the loss of a bankable star, and a public relations nightmare that has the potential to threaten a proposed mega-merger. And there's no doubt that the person who should pay for this instantly legendary clusterfuck is the man at the top who instigated the whole thing: Jeff Zucker.

That likely won't happen, of course. In fact, if you believe what David Carr of the New York Times posted on Twitter yesterday, behind the scenes Zucker is walking around blaming Conan for letting him down by delivering a low-rated show. If this is true, it's astonishing while, strangely, not the least bit surprising -- and it makes Zucker the personification of all that's wrong with corporate America these days. No one takes responsibility; everyone passes the buck; it's always the fault of the victim; and when everything falls apart and the whole thing goes to shit while you're in charge, you get to keep your high-paying job and arrogantly pretend like nothing ever happened.

Here's how it should work: You roll the dice and lose -- you pay up and leave. It feels like anything but a coincidence, though, that neither the guy who created this disaster -- Zucker -- nor the guy who will immediately benefit from it on the air -- Leno -- has the good sense to put humility above ego and step aside. Neither, apparently, will accept the consequences of his actions or an unlucky turn of the cards.

For Leno it's really no surprise: He's a good guy but he's been coasting on ironically aimless ambition, unable to tell you why he wants what he wants only that he wants it, for years. But Zucker shouldn't be able to delude himself; the wreckage piled around him is simply too deep to ignore. NBC is now in ruins, and it happened under his watch and because of his actions.

I never did turn out to be Jeff Zucker, obviously. I was never as focused, didn't have the Harvard education and generally didn't care as much about the business of television as he did. True, I unfortunately didn't get to be a CEO and make ten million a year. But I also won't go down in history as the man who destroyed NBC.

All I'll do is be heartbroken that it happened.

My City of Ruins

Maybe it's time I made something clear.

Back when I was a cocky 23-year-old producer at WSVN in Miami, I was heavily courted by a guy named Don Browne who at the time was the general manager of NBC's owned and operated station in Miami, WTVJ. He badly wanted me to jump ship and become his 11pm producer and he was willing to blow big, billowing clouds of smoke up my ass to make it happen; among the compliments he lavished on me during one particular power lunch between the two of us was a claim that he saw in me the next Jeff Zucker. Now in 1993, Zucker was considered NBC's new boy wonder -- named executive producer of the Today Show at just 26-years-old. So even though I had basically stumbled into TV and had yet to take the entire industry the least bit seriously, I understood that a big-gun at NBC -- and Browne was a Jedi Master in the ways of the Peacock, having been the executive VP of news for NBC at one point -- mentioning me in the same breath as Zucker wasn't the kind of flattery you simply shrugged off. And I didn't -- even though I made the choice to stay at WSVN briefly before heading to Los Angeles to work for KCBS.

I say that I didn't shrug it off because I always kept Browne's praise in the back of my mind and in late 1997 when it became clear that I had allowed myself to become little more than comfortable in my discomfort at KCBS, I put out feelers to Don Browne -- who had expressed a genuine desire to keep in touch with me and promised to always take my call if I felt like I wanted to talk about my career, the business, whatever -- and sure enough, he welcomed the idea of making room for me at WTVJ. As it turned out, the station was going through a regime change, with another NBC wunderkind, 28-year-old Ramon Escobar, having just taken the reins as news director. Browne flew me to Miami, had me meet with everyone and made me an offer I honestly couldn't refuse -- which kind of befit his status as an intimidating Godfather within the NBC power structure.

I'll always be glad I made the decision to go to WTVJ, as it remains one of the best work experiences of my career -- the people there more like family than coworkers. The thing to keep in mind, though, is that one of Don Browne's major selling points during his attempt to draft me was that I wouldn't be working for just anyone -- I'd be working for NBC. To hammer that reality home, he even flew me to New York City to visit 30 Rock; sit in on the Today Show; make it crystal clear that I was going to be a part of something extraordinary. The entire experience was exhilarating -- and it marked the first time that I truly appreciated the career that I had stepped in by accident, the abilities that I had largely taken for granted up to that point.

Bottom line: I was proud to work at NBC. So proud in fact that I continued to work for the company when I moved back out to L.A. with the wife that I had met at WTVJ. So proud that I couldn't have been more thrilled that my shot at personal and professional rebirth and redemption in the wake of 9/11 came from MSNBC and my former news director, Ramon Escobar.

I can occasionally be a bit of a feisty pain in the ass as an employee -- I believe that most decent newspeople are -- but that doesn't mean that I didn't spend years thinking of NBC as my home. It was, to me at least, a shining beacon of terrific programming and rock solid journalism, and one that I felt honored to be a part of.

I bring this up because it should be obvious by now that I pick on NBC quite a bit in the stuff that I write here and at the Huffington Post. Many regular readers have noticed and even confronted me on the seemingly curious fact that I take aim at NBC Universal far more than I even do Fox News Channel.

So I guess I felt like it was time to explain myself: Call it tough love -- borne mostly out of sadness, frustration and, occasionally, outright anger.


Over the past few years, I've watched NBC go from being the network I believed was consistently devoted to excellence above every other consideration -- committed to the notion that, as Don Browne used to say, "First be best, then be first" -- to one that will sacrifice not just quality but any and all ethical considerations in a relentless pursuit of profit. Don't get me wrong, as a company NBC is in the business of making money and there's nothing at all wrong with that -- it just used to achieve that end by offering audiences the best programming and news coverage on television. It was best, which is why it was first, which is why it made money. But somewhere along the line network executives -- particularly and ironically Jeff Zucker, who was named CEO of NBC TV in 2005 and then CEO of the NBC Universal empire in 2007 -- decided that cash would be the only consideration, that it could be amassed without even earning it by means of great shows and a consistently above-the-board news operation at the highest levels of management, and that the rise of cable and non-traditional media provided the perfect excuse for making this kind of major paradigm shift. The shareholders likely thought Zucker was brilliant for expanding NBC's properties across several platforms then turning each into a giant promotional machine for the others until "NBC product placement" was all any NBC show or network was good for; for hiring a worthless, self-obsessed hack like Ben Silverman to dumb down prime time; for bringing in bags of money while slashing costs, culminating in the cynical for-profit-only ploy that put Jay Leno in prime time five nights a week. Unfortunately, while get-rich-quick schemes tend to work well in the short-term, they can be devastating long-term -- and Zucker's not so myopic that he shouldn't have realized this about the business model he'd adopted. There was no meat in the tasty-looking sandwich he was serving day after day, and with the collapse of the Leno show, the impending unceremonious exit of Conan O'Brien and the P.R. cataclysm both have caused for the network, almost everyone, maybe even the mighty shareholders looking down from Olympus, can now see that.

What's happened at NBC -- already a perennially anemic network -- over the past week has been, quite simply, one of the most shameful fiascoes in the history of modern broadcast television. We're talking one for the ages. Pushing out Leno to keep Conan O'Brien was questionable enough a move; giving Leno a prime time slot despite the threat of rebellion from the affiliates whose revenue stream you'd be damming up, just because it'd be a corporate cash cow, was worse; pulling the plug to save a giant deal with Comcast Cable was worse still. Now this: taking back the show that was given to Conan to keep him from jumping ship all to keep Leno from jumping ship -- forcing Conan to gracefully and humbly bow out because he refuses to tarnish the good name of a legendary NBC brand, one that NBC itself apparently has no compunction about making radioactive. It's breathtaking, sociopathic incompetence. It doesn't even make good business sense because, once again, the short-term fears of the twitchiest suits might be salved -- Leno's deadly show at 10pm is six feet under and Conan's underperforming stint on The Tonight Show is cut short -- but the chilling effect that this will have not only on audiences but on any young talent from which you might hope to cultivate loyalty is utterly decimated. Why should anyone trust anything an NBC executive says from here on out?

This is the problem NBC Entertainment Chief Jeff Gaspin is facing right now as he tries to clean up the mess and duck the fire caused by the spectacular implosion of NBC's 10pm and late night lineup (to say nothing of what was left of the network's tattered reputation) and the exit of one of its marquee talents -- the disaster that "boy wonder" Jeff Zucker essentially created. And where is Zucker while all this is going on -- while Gaspin's head is in the crosshairs? Who knows. He hasn't made a public appearance or granted an interview since the crap started rolling downhill last week; I'd like to think that he's in a bunker somewhere honorably falling on his sword, but given that his contract was just bafflingly renewed for another three years, that seems an unlikely scenario. Make no mistake, though -- that's exactly what needs to happen.

I'm willing to concede that Jeff Zucker's meteoric rise was made possible only by his seemingly bottomless reservoir of creative short-term fixes for whatever problems he was confronting at any particular moment, and that the shareholders had demanded that he cut costs and increase profits. But a willingness to take potentially profitable gambles, while admirable, comes with an inherent risk: Somebody needs to pay when a poorly thought-out experiment -- a shockingly obvious "quick fix" -- fails to the tune of millions of dollars, the loss of a bankable star, and a public relations nightmare that has the potential to threaten a proposed mega-merger. And there's no doubt that the person who should pay for this instantly legendary clusterfuck is the man at the top who instigated the whole thing: Jeff Zucker.

That likely won't happen, of course. In fact, if you believe what David Carr of the New York Times posted on Twitter yesterday, behind the scenes Zucker is walking around blaming Conan for letting him down by delivering a low-rated show. If this is true, it's astonishing while, strangely, not the least bit surprising -- and it makes Zucker the personification of all that's wrong with corporate America these days. No one takes responsibility; everyone passes the buck; it's always the fault of the victim; and when everything falls apart and the whole thing goes to shit while you're in charge, you get to keep your high-paying job and arrogantly pretend like nothing ever happened.

Here's how it should work: You roll the dice and lose -- you pay up and leave. It feels like anything but a coincidence, though, that neither the guy who created this disaster -- Zucker -- nor the guy who will immediately benefit from it on the air -- Leno -- has the good sense to put humility above ego and step aside. Neither, apparently, will accept the consequences of his actions or an unlucky turn of the cards.

For Leno it's really no surprise: He's a good guy but he's been coasting on ironically aimless ambition, unable to tell you why he wants what he wants only that he wants it, for years. But Zucker shouldn't be able to delude himself; the wreckage piled around him is simply too deep to ignore. NBC is now in ruins, and it happened under his watch and because of his actions.

I never did turn out to be Jeff Zucker, obviously. I was never as focused, didn't have the Harvard education and generally didn't care as much about the business of television as he did. True, I unfortunately didn't get to be a CEO and make ten million a year. But I also won't go down in history as the man who destroyed NBC.

All I'll do is be heartbroken that it happened.

(This post has been revised slightly, an update edited into it, in the interest of making it self-contained in the archive.)

Mistakes Were Made

Three really good pieces today on the NBC-Leno-Conan debacle:

Chuck Ross at TV Week looks at why NBC suddenly gives a crap about its affiliates after basically telling them to go suck eggs for the last several months. (Here's a hint: Surprise, surprise -- it has everything to do with the proposed Comcast deal):

"OK, let’s review: (Jeff) Gaspin (NBC Universal TV Entertainment chief) says the only reason he’s yanked the Leno show in primetime is because about a third of his affiliates may have started preempting the show. And that it wasn’t the actual preemptions that would have bothered him, but the bad publicity that would accompany just the threat of preemptions. Furthermore, this publicity would be a public relations nightmare and would damage NBC, Gaspin says...

Come on. NBC, the once proud peacock, has gotten so much bad publicity in the last few years as the architect of its own demise that it’s the Tiger Woods of media...

But isn’t he kidding himself, ladies and gentlemen of the jury -- and us as well -- if he doesn’t think that an honest connecting of the dots inevitably and irrefutably leads to the conclusion that the reason NBC all of a sudden fears another 'PR nightmare' right now is because they are indeed worried about the political fallout it could have on the Comcast deal.

Gaspin says he’s just doing his job and does not hear footsteps from Philadelphia. But clearly one of the jobs of a top executive at NBCU today is to ensure that the Comcast deal gets done, since management of NBCU and parent General Electric have said they believe that the consummation of the deal is in the best interests of the company."

The New York Times's David Carr examines NBC's embarrassingly public midlife crisis and wonders what it will mean for NBC Universal chairman Jeff Zucker, whose incompetence has turned a once-proud television network into a nationwide laughingstock:

"It was Mr. Zucker who decided to fix the network’s problems in prime time by putting late night franchises in play and it was, in the end, Mr. Zucker who decided that the solution to bailing out a leaky boat was to blow more holes in the bottom.

Mr. Zucker has a three-year contract with his incoming bosses at Comcast, who will probably notice that everything around him is now horribly damaged. Not since New Coke has a storied brand been so thoroughly maimed. 'The Tonight Show,' once a gilded entertainment franchise, is now just one more broken toy in the mistake pile...

After a series of bold moves, the network is now trying to hedge its way out of the corner, by slipping “Leno” later back in the schedule, which effectively pushes Mr. O’Brien and Jimmy Fallon of “Late Night” deeper into the night...

The message to the younger talent is one thing -- wait for a turn that may never come or may be taken back at any second -- but the message to younger audiences is even clearer: a legacy industry will default to legacy assets and ride them down to the bitter end."

And the irascible Nikke Finke over at Deadline Hollywood notices that while Zucker screwed everything up, it was Gaspin who had to fall on his sword:

"Jeff Gaspin got right down to it because that's what the TV critics and reporters wanted: his first public statement on NBC's late night debacle orchestrated by NBCU boss Jeff Zucker. Of course, Zucker was MIA, leaving Gaspin to clean up the mess and face the press at the Television Critics Association confab this morning.

Afterwards, Gaspin was mobbed onstage by the media, who were surprised to hear him claim that he made the decision to pull the plug on The Jay Leno Show in primetime and then move it to 11:35 PM and in the process shakeup the network's late night -- not Jeff Zucker. (Talk about a failure of leadership at NBC Universal!) 'I called Jeff and said, but this was not news to him, 'It’s time we make the call.' He said, I don’t remember the exact words, but he understood and he didn’t disagree.'"

One more thing: Jeff Gaspin, NBC Universal's embattled head of entertainment TV, who replaced talentless douche Ben Silverman in July of last year, is an MBA who got his start as NBC News's director of financial planning. In other words, although he's an accomplished programmer for VH1 and Bravo, he began his career at NBC as an accountant.

That tells you all you need to know, folks.

Funny Business

Cesca makes a really good point over at his blog right now that I want to expand on a little.

Over the weekend, Saturday Night Live ran a sketch that took aim at Barack Obama and basically sent him up for supposedly not getting anything done since taking office. It wasn't especially funny -- which should come as no surprise -- but it's obviously SNL's prerogative to lampoon whomever they want politically and there's no crime in being even-handed.

The problem is the way MSNBC is now playing the sketch -- and when I say "playing," I don't just mean playing the actual clip over and over (which they are); I mean the way they're playing it as some sort of controversy for the Obama administration to now have to overcome. It's a ridiculous conceit -- albeit one that says plenty about the media's addiction to contrived conflict -- to say that because a sketch comedy show rips on a political figure that the figure in question has to answer for it. I laughed when Tina Fey mercilessly ripped Sarah Palin, but I certainly didn't think that Palin needed to respond to it. The Fey impression, regardless, had the benefit of novelty. The media took to it because it represented a kind of planetary alignment of political-comedic destiny. Everyone's already seen Armisen's Obama impression; this time around it was the material he was doing that acted as a dog whistle for the frothy-mouthed press.

But not the whole press, mind you. On cable, it's mostly MSNBC that's beating this "story" to death. And that's where the real issue becomes obvious -- and things get dicey.

I've written so many times in the past about NBC Universal's obnoxious, non-stop barrage of cross-promotion between its various entities that by now these words can practically type themselves. Turn on any NBC outlet and it'll almost surely be pimping for another NBC outlet in some fashion. The Today Show welcomes the cast of Top Chef, who cook on GE appliances for the crew from Telemundo who are interviewing the star of that new Stargate Universe show on SyFy, who'll be guest hosting the Today Show next week along with one of the Real Housewives of Wherever-the-Hell. Long ago NBC decided that what it didn't have in quality it was going to make up for in seamless corporate synergy across all platforms. (Constantly pointing this out, incidentally, even through outright mockery, is part of the meta-genius that's made 30 Rock not only funny but useful to NBC.) The problem is that in an effort to promote Saturday Night Live -- which MSNBC does regularly every chance it gets like a good little corporate team player -- it behooves MSNBC to make it seem as if SNL is the kind of cultural juggernaut that has the power to spark controversy and make news. That when the show does something like, say, slam Barack Obama -- the shockwaves are felt in the highest corridors of power.

This is the definition of a conflict of interest. By MSNBC deeming that an SNL sketch has the power to make trouble for the President of the United States, and actually debating it as such -- ad nauseam -- MS is doing the NBC mothership a very big favor. NBC's news department is acting as a promotional tool for NBC programming.

There aren't strong enough words to describe how ethically questionable this is.

Although, we're talking about the same network that devoted an entire episode of Dateline, ostensibly a news magazine program, to pimping Donald Trump and The Apprentice.

At this point, I'm not sure anything NBC did would surprise me.

Into Thin Air

In Paddy Chayefsky and Sidney Lumet's 1976 film Network -- still the most brilliantly dead-on indictment of the entire business of TV ever created, for any medium -- disturbed and ultimately doomed news anchor Howard Beale says, "Television is not the truth. Television is a goddamned amusement park."

Nowhere is this statement, particularly the latter half of it, more appallingly true than in South Florida.

For two decades, the entire market has been a petri dish in which the most virulent trends in television were first grown and experimented with before being released into the nationwide media bloodstream to infect every TV outlet from Denver to Des Moines. "If it bleeds, it leads?" You can thank WSVN for that. The rise of the "duopoly" -- basically where one company owns two local stations, often running them out of the same building? South Florida was at the forefront of that movement. High-gloss, graphically-enhanced, hallucinatory news read by, almost literally, Barbie dolls? You're welcome. In the same way that the Miami area has always operated as a sort of modern-day Casablanca for those with only the most gossamer of moral fiber -- a separate nation-state where the normal rules don't really apply and the definition of a criminal enterprise depends on your perspective -- it's likewise been a place where questionable tactics and techniques in modern media can travel under the radar until their success in the market becomes all the justification anyone needs to adopt them on a large scale.

Case in point, the event that started it all: On January 1st, 1989, after a bitter and confusing dogfight between rival companies for control of various shares of the South Florida television pie, three stations were forced to switch network affiliations. WCIX, which had been, up to that point, an independent airing reruns of Gilligan's Island, was suddenly blessed with CBS programming; NBC began airing on the former CBS station, WTVJ; and the erstwhile NBC station -- WSVN -- became an affiliate of the fledgling Fox network. Confused? Imagine being a South Florida viewer, waking up one morning to find yourself left to sort out this mess. The game of musical channels didn't end there, though. In 1995, thanks to a larger deal between then-owner of CBS Westinghouse and NBC -- the kind of trade agreement often found in professional sports, which leaves bit players taking on the role of pawns at the mercy of greedy owners -- WTVJ and WCIX swapped transmission signals. Once again, viewers awoke one morning to find CBS and NBC programming on opposite channels for reasons which, to them, must've seemed inexplicable -- and in fact were, insofar as they had nothing at all to do with South Florida and were basically just the offshoot of a contract that involved stations in Philadelphia and Boston. Like a new divorcée on a quest for personal reinvention, and because it had moved from channel 6 to 4 on the dial, WCIX -- the ex-CBS affiliate -- changed its call letters, unimaginatively, to WFOR.

Twice in 20 years, the landscape of South Florida television changed drastically, with lasting and far-reaching repercussions.

And now it could be about to happen again.


On Tuesday it was reported that media giant Post-Newsweek -- which owns WPLG 10, the ABC mainstay in South Florida -- will soon announce the purchase of WTVJ. NBC Universal put WTVJ up for sale back in March as part of a sell-off of the underperforming entities within its Television Stations Division, but the bombshell that WTVJ's network TV competition will be buying it is nothing short of jaw-dropping. In case you're wondering, it is actually legal for one company to own two stations in the same city -- it's done all the time in fact -- but typically the pairing involves a network TV affiliate and an independent, to avoid a direct conflict of interest, or two major stations in small areas where the competition isn't as great a consideration. This will mark the first time that this kind of deal has been attempted in a top 20 market -- the first time one company has sought to own two "big four" network affiliates in an area this size. It's no exaggeration to say that nothing will ever be the same.

According to FCC regulations, a deal like this can only be approved if one of the two stations in question isn't in the top four in terms of local audience share; right now WPLG is number one in the market, while WTVJ is a distant sixth. Aside from the obvious conflict of interest (the very definition of a conflict of interest being the act of competing with yourself and, in effect, needing to keep one side of the equation from ever truly succeeding to survive) the big question in all of this involves WTVJ's news department, as in what will happen to it? Nonthreatening buzzwords like "consolidation" are already being tossed around by some, no doubt meant to both reassure the nervous employees of the oldest and most honored television news organization in South Florida -- the people who understand that this buy-out could render them expendable -- as well as convince the community at large that a deal like this is not only a financial necessity but can, in fact, be a win-win for all involved. Unfortunately, such platitudes shouldn't get anyone's hopes up. This is a business deal in every possible connotation, and with the harsh reality of that firmly in mind, the only logical and cost-effective move WPLG's management has is to completely dismantle WTVJ's newsroom and sell syndicated programming to advertisers in the space where the station's newscasts once ran.

This makes the most sense. It's what's most likely to happen. And it's fucking criminal.

As much as I'd like to be able to claim otherwise, it's almost impossible for me to discuss this subject in impartial, purely academic terms. I just can't do it. As it turns out, I have an intimate working knowledge of both WTVJ and WPLG; at different points in my career, I worked at each station -- as a producer at the former and a manager at the latter. I have friends still employed in both newsrooms and fond memories of time spent working alongside them. Both WTVJ and WPLG are staffed, in large part, with talented, hard-working people -- which makes the act of watching one station being brought to submission by the other damn near heartbreaking. In particular, the journalists at WTVJ who've toiled for the past several years under the strain of corporate neglect, consistent upper-level mismanagement and the low ratings that have resulted from both -- shattering the station's reputation and the pride of purpose they once held so dear -- deserve not simply praise for their efforts; they deserve better. They always did.

Despite having worked in both places, it's no secret that a little bit of my heart remains with WTVJ; my time there represents, quite simply, one of the highlights of my career -- the people there, family. To see what's become of an operation that was once so respected and revered by its staff and its competition would leave any former employee -- from Katie Couric to the late David Bloom to anyone who remembers the station's heyday -- both dumbfounded and infuriated. When I left WTVJ to move to Los Angeles in 2000, the entire organization was preparing to relocate to a new state-of-the-art facility that would put it leaps and bounds ahead of its competitors in terms of technology. The future didn't just look bright for the station, which was consistently placing at or near the top of the ratings; it seemed as if the very best days of its storied tenure were ahead of it. What wound up happening, however, could literally be written up as a how-to manual for those curious about the most effective means of running a television operation right into the ground: Arrogance trumped execution; new managers began making one inexplicable decision after another; true journalists were trampled underfoot or let go altogether while pretty faces were pampered; opportunities were squandered; morale plummeted in conjunction with falling ratings and the feeling that the station's glory days were fading into the collective rearview mirror; as it so often does, failure bred failure. In the words of a fellow ex-employee of WTVJ -- a former co-worker of mine -- the station died years ago, it just took this long for someone to finally put it in the ground.


And that someone, from what it looks like, will be a man named Dave Boylan.

On the front line anyway, Boylan is in charge of facilitating Post-Newsweek's takeover of WTVJ. His official title is Vice President and General Manager of WPLG, which to all but the most inherently distrusting betrays nothing of the pitch black reality of who Dave Boylan is, what his responsibilities are, and the legacy of scorched earth that he's left in his wake as he's honed his reputation for being one of the most admirably skilled corporate hatchet men in the business of local TV. Boylan represents, quite frankly, everything that's wrong with, and utterly deplorable about, today's television industry -- all wrapped up in one slick, discomforting package. If you could figure out a way to slap a threateningly charming Cheshire grin on a locust -- or any creature which travels from place to place, consuming every resource the locals hold dear, then moving on -- you'd have Boylan. What's worse, he and those who think like him stand as the unavoidable future of market-level media.

Dave Boylan began his television career not in news or even promotions but in sales. From day one, he's looked at TV strictly as a business, one in which the news department can occasionally be an advantage and occasionally be an impediment to making money for the people at the top of the food chain. Before arriving at WPLG in South Florida, Boylan spent three years managing the KTTV/KCOP duopoly in Los Angeles, where he helped set the tone for news departments that boasted the Jillian Barberie/Dorothy Lucey/Lisa Joyner trifecta of style-over-substance and concocted horseshit top stories tied into WWF lead-ins, respectively. Boylan has actually bragged about the fact that he hired KCOP's Lauren Sanchez, a woman who could very well represent the highest reverse correlation between beauty and qualifications in all of television news. But it was at WTVT, the Fox-owned station in Tampa, where Boylan first mastered the art of corporate capitulation at the expense of journalistic responsibility. During his tenure there in the late 90s, he became embroiled in a minor scandal involving two of his investigative reporters and one very large, very angry agricultural company.

Steve Wilson and Jane Akre -- WTVT's husband-and-wife investigative team -- had discovered that, despite promises to the contrary, grocery stores across Florida were selling milk produced through the use of recombinant bovine growth hormone, or rBGH. The hormone, developed by the Monsanto Company, was intended to boost milk production in cows. Unfortunately, some scientists claim that rBGH also boosts the levels of a certain type of hormone within that milk -- one that causes cancer in people who drink it. To make a long story short, Wilson and Akre's story never aired because Monsanto found out about it ahead of time and put pressure on Hutt-like Fox News chief Roger Ailes who told Dave Boylan to handle it. After putting them through the ringer -- forcing rewrite after rewrite in an effort to supposedly try to give the story more "balance" -- Boylan killed the thing outright and fired Wilson and Akre for reportedly refusing to include what, by almost all accounts, was false information in the story, but not before telling them (according to the lawsuit they immediately filed against the station), "We paid $3 billion for these television stations. We will decide what the news is. The news is what we tell you it is." Boylan was forced to testify to his actions when the suit went to court; Wilson and Akre wound up winning under Florida's whistleblower law, only to have the judgment overturned on appeal by Fox. Boylan, of course, lived to vitiate another day.

Now, he's likely going to assume control of WTVJ and, as any conquering Visigoth might, sack the hell out of it.

That said, however -- all of that said -- it is indeed within his right. Boylan has been at the helm of WPLG as it's gone from battling for the top spot within the market to absolutely dominating it. The station is number one across the board, 9am to midnight, Monday through Sunday. And unfortunately, no one can argue with success like that.

That friend of mine, my former co-worker at WTVJ, probably put it most succinctly: "He won. He gets to do what he wants."

Which doesn't make me feel any better about the prospect of a news department with that much history in South Florida winding up as nothing more than a head on the wall of Dave Boylan's office. And, to some extent, that's exactly what it will be. The plan is for WTVJ, as an entity, to move out of its current home and into WPLG's new facility, currently under construction southwest of Ft. Lauderdale. Adding the worst kind of insult to injury: WSVN, the local Fox affiliate, is reportedly already discussing plans to move into and take over WTVJ's building. That sprawling, state-of-the-art complex that once represented the shining future of WTVJ may soon be occupied by one of the station's fiercest competitors.

It would be easy to assert that this entire scenario shouldn't be allowed to happen -- that a vigilant FCC will almost certainly stand in the way. Such beliefs are little more than impotent pipe dreams in this age of media deregulation, however. While one television station moving to swallow its competition whole -- thereby further homogenizing the flow of information to the community each is supposed to serve -- may seem like the kind of thing that would never be approved by the government, it's simply naive to assume that Post-Newsweek would undertake such brazen action if it weren't reasonably assured of success. Television is, once again, a business after all -- and the people running it know their business.

But it's important to keep in mind that legality and corruption aren't necessarily mutually exclusive notions, and although the bottom line may win in this case -- and in the dozens of cases just like it that will no doubt follow -- the audience will suffer. The truth will suffer.

Like Howard Beale said though, television isn't the truth -- it's an amusement park.

And after 20 years, I'm betting a lot of people in South Florida want the roller-coaster ride to finally end.

Let the Games Begin

Time for another epidsode of Corporate Media Synergy Conspiracy Theory Rock (with all due credit to Robert Smigel):

Has anybody else out there wondered why, after seven merciful years, Universal decided to greenlight another installment in the financially fluid but creatively bankrupt Mummy series? Unless you've been living in a cave for the past few weeks, you probably noticed the onslaught of TV advertising for The Mummy: Tomb of the Dragon Emperor, particularly on networks like USA, Sci-Fi, and Bravo -- all of which are owned by Universal.

If you really paid attention, you probably also noticed the suspicious release date for this new piece of over-produced Hollywood dreck -- which takes the tired Mummy formula, transports it to "mystical" China and injects Jet Li into the proceedings.

That date: August 1st -- exactly one week before the start of the Olympic games, which just happen to be taking place in -- where else? -- China, and just happen to be airing on NBC, yet another Universal property.

In other words, Universal -- with, one would imagine, at least a little forethought -- bought itself a 125-million dollar advertisement for Chinese culture at a time when it could translate into not simply bucks at the box office but a substantial secondary revenue from the viewers it just might help drive to the games on NBC.

Because right now, those games -- not to mention China itself -- need all the good press they can get.