New York Times:
  • At its height, NBC was the very model of what a television network should be. With iconic programming, enviable ratings and spectacular business success, the peacock network delivered plenty of laughs along the way with “The Cosby Show,” “Seinfeld” and “Friends.”

    Nobody is laughing anymore.

    Today the network is in shambles, brought down not just by the challenges facing broadcast television — fragmenting audiences, an advertising downturn — but also by a series of executive missteps that have made its prime-time lineup a perennial loser and, most recently, turned its late night programming schedule into a media circus that threatens the lucrative “Tonight Show” franchise.

    “We live in a society today that loves a soap opera,” Jeff Zucker, the chief executive of NBC Universal, said in an interview in his office at 30 Rockefeller Plaza in New York on Friday. “Three months ago it was David Letterman. Six weeks ago it was Tiger Woods’s problems. Today it’s NBC’s problems.”

    At the end of the interview in Mr. Zucker’s office, Steve Capus, the head of NBC News, spoke up strongly on behalf of his boss, saying the news media had blown the late-night ordeal “out of proportion,” especially, he said, in light of more important stories like the tragedy in Haiti. “He is paying a price that is so out of whack with what is happening here,” he said.


Yeah, Capus, you tell him. Those news people have no integrity whatsoev...