At the end of the day there is simply nothing more stunning about the Conan-Leno-NBC meltdown than this: Jeff Zucker still has a job.
Zucker-bashing has been a tried-and-true sport among entertainment reporters, business analysts, and Hollywood insiders for years. No one, the storyline goes, has done so much to destroy something so valuable and been rewarded so handsomely in the process. I won’t pile on lest I get a nosebleed on the way up….
But at the risk of further angering the guy who works for GE Medical in the UK …
It’s almost too easy to take apart “reporters” and “newspapers” that claim to be practicing journalism. But when they go after actual journalists doing actual journalism it’s worth a note.
Tuesday’s review of Diane Sawyer’s debut in Tuesday’s NY Post is a case in point. Kyle Smith goes on a spleen dump and gets almost everything comically wrong. He’s one the the paper’s TV writers but you wouldn’t know it from his lack of knowledge, writing ability, or research acumen.
First let me say for the record that I don’t have strong …
In all the coverage about Comcast’s purchase of NBC there’s been tons of talk about how NBC Universal has done very badly in the traditional broadcast television world but succeeded handily in cable. True enough if your horizon stretches no further than, say, next summer.
The obits for broadcast have been written before and with $600 billion in ad revenues sloshing around I’d bet the reports of broadcast television’s death are still very premature. But there’s no denying cable networks have a better economic model — at this moment.
The potentially fatal …
If you want some advice about marriage — same-sex or otherwise — I can’t think of anyone better to ask than convicted girlfriend-batterer, ex-cop, and current New York State Senator Hiram Monserrate. Monserrate was one of eight Democrats in the state’s “upper” chamber who voted against allowing people of the same gender to marry yesterday.
(Irony alert! Four of the eight ‘no’ votes came from members who represent Queens — but apparently not queens.)
Although I’m sure he had very good reasons for his decision (the word in Albany and his Elmhurst …
You didn’t even need to pick up a copy of the New York Post this morning to know the paper’s oh-so-predictable verdict on President Obama’s speech at West Point. In fact you didn’t even have to watch the paper’s stable mates at Fox last night to know what was coming. Because it’s been coming for months. For his legion of well-heeled and widely-distributed critics, the bottom line is simply, if it’s coming out of Obama’s mouth or Obama’s White House it is, by definition, bad, misguided, and probably un-American. Their …
When we wrote last week about the ridiculous press release put out by the New York State Rifle and Pistol Association claiming that David Yassky lost his run-off primary race for New York City Comptroller because he was a proponent of gun control we got the predictable stream of unpublishable screeds and a few comment arguing with our reasoning.
Putting aside the venom, several people wrote to say that Yassky had made gun control an issue in this race, one stating that Yassky had made it a “central issue of his …