Howard Kurtz Dishes on NBC Drama

Howard Kurtz, now the Washington Bureau Chief for The Daily Beast, has been making news lately with stories about Roger Ailes, and about the infighting at NBC news. His excuse? “I’ve been liberated from the mainstream media!”
 
Also, The Daily Beast, a website created and edited by Tina Brown, “knows how to package and promote” a good story, he said. As for whether he made a monetary sacrifice when he jumped from the Washington Post to the Daily Beast, Kurtz told Imus, “Let’s just say I’m not in danger of going on food stamps.”
 
Last week Kurtz addressed the so-called “vicious” internal strife at MSNBC, where Keith Olbermann, host of Countdown, the network’s most successful program, was recently suspended for a few days after the higher-ups discovered he had made donations to political candidates, which is not permitted by on-air commentators.
 
“He’s an incredibly talented broadcaster, but a real management headache,” Kurtz, also the host of CNN’s Reliable Sources, said. In a few weeks, Comcast’s takeover of NBC should be completed, and it remains to be seen, in Kurtz view, “whether the buttoned-down crowd at Comcast is going to have the patience for managing Keith Olbermann.”
 
Kurtz also revealed in his article that Olbermann’s suspension was limited to two days only after he threatened to take his case against NBC public by appearing on shows like Good Morning America, Larry King Live, and The Late Show with David Letterman.
 
“Olbermann apologized, but he never apologized to NBC or MSNBC,” Kurtz said. “He apologized to the viewers, and that did not go unnoticed at 30 Rock.”
 
NBC puts up with Olbermann, Kurtz explained, because his 8 o’clock primetime show is the network’s highest-rated program, even though his numbers, at around 1.3 million viewers per night, pale in comparison to the approximately 3.1 million sets of eyes Bill O’Reilly garners each night on Fox News at the same time.
 
“The first 11 years of its existence, MSNBC was floundering,” Kurtz said. “It went from one program to another—it was Alan Keyes, it was Phil Donohue, it was Jesse Venutra—they could not find any traction.”
 
Now, their evening lineup, consisting of Olbermann, Rachel Maddow, Lawrence O’Donnell, and others, has started to do “respectable numbers,” according to Kurtz, and has even beat CNN lately in primetime.
 
Not that NBC’s management has a reputation for genius, having locked Conan O’Brien in to hosting The Tonight Show five years in advance just so neither he nor its current host, Jay Leno, would bolt from the network. After just seven months and poor ratings, Conan left NBC earlier this year instead of agreeing to push his show’s start time to 12:05, so that Leno could do a half-hour show at 11:35.
 
In Imus’s view, Conan should have taken the counsel of NBC executive Dick Ebersole, who, according to Bill Carter’s book The War For Late Night, repeatedly told him that his formula at 12:30 a.m. would not work for an 11:30 p.m. audience.
 
Conan also should have listened to a fellow comedian. “He should have taken Jerry Seinfeld’s advice,” Imus said. “Don’t leave.” Now, as Imus noted, Conan is ironically stuck on TBS alongside wrestling and, well, Seinfeld reruns.
 
-Julie Kanfer