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January 20, 2010 | Uncategorized | editor | 0 Comments
Last night David Letterman read some quotes from Dick Ebersol, who has been an exec at NBC since the early 70‘s and head of NBC Sports since 1989. He’s mostly known as a fuckup who doesn’t have any sports in his sports department. Under him NBC lost NASCAR, the NBA, MLB, and just a few months ago lost all college football bowl games until at least 2015. The NFL had been on NBC since 1939, but he lost them in 1997 when the AFC moved to CBS.
His notable achievements include the Olympics (NBC is expected to lose 200 million in the Winter Olympics beginning next month), the XFL (the game on March 31, 2000 was the lowest rated prime time show ever) and an exclusive contract with Notre Dame football that began in 1988. Notre Dame has been ranked in the top 10 just once since 1994, but Ebersol signed a new contract last year to renew the deal and pay them somewhere between 9-15 million a year through 2015.
So how does someone like this keep his job? By endless ass kissing of course. In an article with the tagline, “NBC’s Ebersol defends Leno and Zucker”, The New York Times says…
Referring to the pointed jokes made this week by Mr. O’Brien and David Letterman of CBS, Mr. Ebersol said it was “chicken-hearted and gutless to blame a guy you couldn’t beat in the ratings.”
He added that “what this is really all about is an astounding failure by Conan.”
“He was just stubborn about not being willing to broaden the appeal of his show … we bet on the wrong guy.”
There’s literally no one on earth less qualified to criticize Conan when it comes to his ability to get ratings and make a profitable TV show. Ebersol even created an entire channel devoted only to sports like bobsled, luge and rowing. That might be the single dumbest idea anyone, be it an individual or group, has ever had, under any context, at any time past or present on planet Earth. I wouldn’t advertise on a channel focusing on bobsleds even if I owned a company that made bobsleds AND the ads were free. Because what’s the point?