"How Zucker's Leno quick fix got NBC into a quagmire"--that's the just-desserts headline atop the compelling report by the LA Times' Meg James and Matea Gold. As they report, Jeff Zucker's recklessness might cost NBC-U as much as $200 million. That'a s lot of jack, even for Comcast.
James and Gold pile it on:
"Everything about this decision seems to have been a disaster," said Jeffrey Cole, director of the Center for the Digital Future at the USC Annenberg School for Communication. "It looks like NBC shot itself in the foot, the arm, the neck -- and everywhere else."
Update: The Business Insider's Jay Yarow takes a look at the "boneheads" at NBC who caused this disaster: The chief bonehead, in Yarow's reckonig, is Zucker. Yarow quotes The New York Times' David Carr writing:
“[I]t 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...
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."
