Here’s your quote of the day and you should read it a couple of times so that it’s seared into your memory:

“Just because Jon Stewart makes fun of it doesn’t mean he’s right.”

That’s CNN Worldwide President Jeff Zucker, at a meeting of the Atlanta Press Club earlier this week. Zucker was smugly brushing off the criticism his network has been on the receiving end of since he took control and turned it into the Poop Cruise channel. According to the man most famous for running NBC into the ground — laying the foundation, or lack thereof, that would take it from first place to an unprecedented fifth place in the national numbers — those mocking CNN on other TV outlets are just jealous, while the torrent of ridicule the network has faced lately on social media is merely to be ignored, particularly those irritating voices on Twitter, a platform he considers a “frenemy.” Jeff Zucker, by the way, is apparently a 16-year-old Mean Girl holding court at Beverly Hills High School.

When he took over CNN, Zucker notoriously said that he was going to broaden the definition of journalism to the point where, one would imagine, he’d be able to put anything on CNN and call it news — employing a twist on the Nixonian logic that if the president does it, it’s not illegal — while also suddenly viewing half of what was on cable as his competition. To that end, after his self-satisfied shot at Jon Stewart, he admitted that he considers The Daily Show one of those new competitors.

Maybe that’s what makes it so entertaining that Jon Stewart gets to rub Zucker’s face in CNN’s breathtaking fuck-up yesterday, the one that saw network stalwart John King report that there had been an arrest in the Boston Marathon bombing and, at the prodding of Wolf Biltzer, that the man under arrest was a “dark-skinned male.” Now make no mistake, there’s nothing at all funny about CNN’s embarrassing mistake, which truly was one for the ages, a moment that should live on literally as a teachable one by being examined closely in every first-year broadcast journalism class at every university across the country for decades to come.

We all know what eventually wound up happening: CNN was wrong. Dead wrong. About everything. And it had to walk it all back live on the air while trying desperately to cover its own ass. A national news network had reported that an arrest had been made in a terrorist attack and that the suspect very likely confirmed the worst fears of a very large segment of the public. The implications for America and for a hell of a lot of Americans couldn’t be overstated. And the whole damn thing was wrong.

And so, last night, pointing out the disastrous impact the report could’ve had for the country and did have for CNN while also, admittedly, enjoying more than a little understandable schadenfreude, Jon Stewart eviscerated CNN on The Daily Show — and took a not-so-subtle shot right at Zucker by running clips of the initial CNN “exclusive” and saying with phony diffidence, “You know, this is why you turn to CNN in a crisis. We make fun of them sometimes… you know, as one of their competitors I guess we just get a little jealous.” It was a personal slap across Zucker’s face that no one in the audience probably got, but if you followed TV closely was a moment to cherish.

There isn’t a person out there with a working pair of eyes and ears and a knowledge of recent events who doesn’t know that Jeff Zucker is a narcissistic ass with a history of failing upward who’s practically destined to destroy what remains of the once-great CNN from the inside out. Yesterday’s on-air disgrace shows that it’s already happening, and Zucker’s arrogant dismissal of those who know what’s coming and who publicly lament it lets you know that what we’re seeing now is only the beginning.

Yeah, Jeff, maybe Jon Stewart’s not right about everything he makes fun of. But he’s right about CNN.

CNN just proved it.

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It probably seems like I write quite a bit about NBC and its problems. In fact, I do, and there’s a reason for this. I spent a good portion of my career in television news working for NBC, at both the national and local level, and that time with the network always represented one of the proudest accomplishments of my life in the business. It’s easy to pick on, say, Fox News over and over again; with the exception of my good friend and former coworker Shep Smith, the place is generally a wasteland of lunacy and nonsense. But I expect more from NBC and always have. I know what the network is capable of, what its reputation has meant, and what those who worked under its banner years ago expected of themselves and the product they created. NBC, as far as I’m concerned — and I know there are plenty of others who feel the same way and would tell you the same thing — used to be the top of the heap in broadcasting and to work there was an unqualified honor. That was then, anyway. Now? Now I have no idea what the hell is going on at the network. It’s nothing short of shameful to see how far NBC has fallen — how far it’s been allowed to fall by those whose job it is to steward its good name.

I honestly didn’t think things could get worse after the disaster that was the tenure of Jeff Zucker, when talentless egomaniac Ben Silverman was allowed to run roughshod over the network’s prime time, inept personnel decisions were made that saw Leno moved to 10pm in a cynical money grab and Conan ultimately sent packing, and many of Steve Capus’s monumentally unethical news philosophies were backed with the full faith and credit of the peacock. I figured Zucker’s reign of terror was about as bad as it could get and when he was gone the network would have nowhere to go but up. Then, of course, came the damn-near sociopathic firing of Ann Curry and the shockwaves felt at Today in the wake of it, a dearth of good programming so pronounced that in the critical February sweeps period NBC dropped to fifth place for the first time in its history, and now this: the decision to run with a jailhouse interview with Penn State child rapist Jerry Sandusky conducted by a proven bullshit artist and conspiracy theorist with a stated agenda and an axe to grind against the mainstream media.

Yesterday, I sat having lunch with my girlfriend and I found myself getting viscerally angry, asking out loud, “What the hell is going on over there?” I genuinely want someone to answer that question. I need to know how a network that was once above-the-board to a fault, that made a point of holding its employees to the highest possible standards in broadcasting, is now seemingly run by people who legitimately have no fucking clue what they’re doing. It’s as if someone in NBC management is specifically out to destroy 30 Rock from the inside out. That’s the only possible conclusion I can draw from a series of decisions so thoroughly incompetent and beyond rational explanation that they couldn’t have happened by accident. There’s no way fuck-ups this egregious can be simple mistakes. It takes skill to be that dumb.

It’s one thing to make a bad move or two, or even to do something that might provoke a negative initial response with the knowledge that bad publicity can still translate into good publicity, but I can’t for the life of me figure out what NBC was thinking by going with the Sandusky segment and subsequent interview with John Ziegler. Today is in such shambles right now, as detailed in a lengthy new piece in New York Magazine, the latest to document the show’s slide into oblivion, that you’d think the managers running it would be so careful about not pissing off anyone else that they’d treat Today like they were handling a case of nitro glycerine. What they wouldn’t do is run a jailhouse one-on-one with one of the most loathed men in America, an unrepentant sexual predator who destroyed the lives of dozens of children, without being able to make a bulletproof argument as to its news value, then, worse, allow a carnival barking defender of that monster and those who protected him the opportunity to grandstand on national television.

The decision to go with the Sandusky segment was mind-boggling in its stupidity. It’s not the work of a news or programming manager with even a hint of talent or smarts. It’s the work of a monkey. And it’s par for the course at NBC these days.

I miss what NBC used to be. I respected the network and its people and was proud to count myself among their ranks. I wouldn’t be able to say the same thing were I there right now. Now, the whole place is a bad joke, and I can tell you that no one feels worse about it than those who lived and died by what NBC once stood for.

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It looks like Jimmy Fallon will be the next challenger to step up and try to knock Jay Leno off his throne on The Tonight Show. If you believe Bill Carter over at The New York Times, and there’s no reason not to given Carter’s unparalleled expertise on the subject, NBC is planning to once again attempt to rid itself of the Fidel Castro of late-night TV, this time in 2014. Supposedly, the deal’s already been scribbled out in pencil and a very quiet transition is now underway behind the scenes at both 30 Rock and Burbank that would send Leno on his way once and for all and not only christen Fallon as the new host of Tonight but move the entire show back to New York City, where it was uprooted from in 1972 at the request of a more West Coast-friendly Johnny Carson.

The New York relocation is hugely important because it’s something NBC isn’t doing just to change things up. The network knows that after the debacle that was its hand-off of the show to Conan O’Brien in 2009 followed almost immediately by its retraction of the show, very ugly dismissal of O’Brien and reinstatement of the terminally unfunny Leno, it has to do something to prove to Jimmy Fallon that he’s not going down a road to oblivion. When the whole Tonight Show thing blew up in NBC’s face, I said that one of the biggest challenges the network was going to face in the wake of such a sociopathically incompetent and short-sighted fuck-up would be trying to convince even loyal talent that it valued them — that it wasn’t going to screw them over the first time the numbers went the wrong way or a better opportunity came along. The basic question I posed was, “How can anybody trust anything NBC says from this point forward?”

NBC executives know this. They know that when it comes to any discussion of pushing Leno out of Tonight in favor of somebody else — particularly when Leno remains on top of the ratings, the same way he was last time around — even the hungriest potential candidate for the top spot in late-night television will take their overtures with a grain of salt if he or she has a brain. And that’s why, if Carter’s report is true, NBC is offering to move the show to Fallon rather than Fallon to the show: it’s a show of good faith. By retrofitting the show around Fallon rather than the other way around, NBC makes it known that the new host won’t simply be another random successor plugged into a hallowed property steeped in stuffy tradition but the new face and attitude of a new kind of Tonight Show. Make no mistake: it’s what Tonight has needed for decades and, provided NBC makes good on its promise, this could be the smartest decision the network has made, certainly talent-wise, in a very long time.

I’ve never been a massive fan of Fallon, meaning that he doesn’t really sway me to watch a lot of Late Night, but I certainly appreciate that he has a kind of broad-based appeal that’s tough to argue against. He’s quirky but unthreatening, clever without being cerebral, smart but not smug. And his stint on Late Night has shown that he understands what it takes to be a star and make a splash in the age of social media. In short, he’s exactly what The Tonight Show needs if it wants to survive as a powerful piece of television real estate in the coming years.

As for Leno, while Jeff Zucker and Jeff Gaspin may have moved mountains to put him back in place at 11:35pm weeknights three years ago, screwing Conan O’Brien in nearly unprecedented ways, they did so mostly out of fear of losing his ratings power to somebody else and to stave off an affiliate revolt in response to their cynical 10pm Leno show experiment. Nobody at NBC besides Zucker and Gaspin really wanted to see Leno back on Tonight, certainly not as a matter of personal preference. And what did the two Jeffs get for their splendid handling of the transition and re-transition of The Tonight Show? Fired. Zucker was canned unceremoniously in late 2010, as soon as the Comcast deal went through, and Gaspin bit the dust soon after, thanks in part to his belief that he deserved to shit in a $200,000 private bathroom.

Bottom line: Sure, Leno still pulls in the numbers, but everyone knows that it won’t last — that his relevancy has waned significantly and among the cultural tastemakers NBC wants to be able to reach out to in the future, he’s practically toxic. The fact that Leno has spent the past several weeks hammering NBC’s anemic ratings and various PR disasters in his opening monologues — something I actually tip my hat to him for — also hasn’t earned him any new fans in the peacock adminisphere. Right now, he’s kind of a man without a lot of friends.

But that doesn’t mean NBC won’t try to figure out a way to keep him around or renege on whatever plans it may have for Fallon at the last minute. I’d love to see the network finally make the decision to ditch Leno, but only a fool would bet against the guy. He’s proven to be harder to get rid of than herpes.

NBC could be making a really bold, smart choice or it could fall back on the old and reliable ways we’ve come to expect. When it comes to this network, you’ve gotta wait until all the chips have fallen to see who’s left with what. And even then you can’t really be sure.

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Let’s get right into it. Yes, CNN’s coverage of the verdict in the Steubenville rape trial, whether entirely intentional or not, came off as more than a little biased in favor of the teenagers who were on trial for the crime rather than either extending the same courtesy to the victim or, even better, remaining objective and dispassionate. Now, if you can’t see why this is, why CNN did what it did, you’ve apparently forgotten that this is the same network that went completely ape-shit over a stranded cruise ship last month, putting every available reporter on it, at the exclusion of a lot of other important news, and blowing up what was essentially a nonsense story that affected exactly nobody in the audience into the second coming of the Hindenburg. How CNN didn’t print up t-shirts with a picture of a cruise liner and the words “2/15 – Never Forget” on them is startling when you consider the amount of resources and airtime the network dedicated to the Carnival Triumph “disaster.”

The point is this: Emotion and stories that play on emotion — stories that seek a visceral reaction from viewers rather than a cold, analytical response — make for great TV. Television is a visual medium and the angle of the story with the best visual element will almost always win the day. And because the victim in the Steubenville rape case was shielded from the press and therefore wasn’t available to have her emotions splashed across the airwaves and otherwise exploited by the coyotes of the media — because she couldn’t be put on camera and we couldn’t see her cry — the focus of the story became the people whose reaction we actually could see: Trent Mays and Ma’Lik Richmond. Is this wrong? Yes. In a case like this, offensive? Absolutely. This, unfortunately, is how it is, though.

I’d really like not to be able to pin something like this on new CNN chief Jeff Zucker, the man almost entirely responsible for the Carnival Triumph debacle — not the cruise itself, the obsessive-compulsive cruise coverage — but it’s hard to ignore the ethical and journalistic bankruptcy of Zucker’s overall news philosophy. Keep in mind that before he ran NBC completely into the ground, he was the wunderkind who turned the Today show into a ratings and revenue goldmine by treating fluff with the kind of gravitas normally reserved for real news and staging gimmicky “event” programming designed to get people talking around the water cooler. Zucker loves emotion. He loves it a lot more than real, honest-to-Christ news, which can occasionally be wonky, unwieldy and impossible to distill down to an instantly memorable soundbite or the image of the crying mother of a missing kid.

I’m not saying that a specific edict came down from Jeff Zucker notifying the CNN talent and producer corps that they should concentrate on the pain and suffering of Trent Mays and Ma’Lik Richmond instead of that of the unnamed victim as the Steubenville rape trial finally came to a decision. But the boss’s worldview instantly becomes the staff’s worldview, and it wouldn’t surprise me if a kind of robotic groupthink kicked in and even some of CNN’s best and brightest, like Candy Crowley and Poppy Harlow, succumbed to it without even realizing it. When there’s upheaval in a newsroom — or any other place with a new person in charge, for that matter — everyone tends to overcompensate in favor of doing what he or she figures the boss wants, even if that person isn’t acutely aware of it.

If you’re talking about something silly and superficial, like, say, beating the story of a stranded cruise ship to death because it’s a great picture and you’re sure to get powerful soundbites when the thing finally docks, it’s not the end of the world. It’s baffling and ridiculous, sure, but not unforgivable. But when you’re talking about the story of a young girl who was dragged around from party to party and defiled in unspeakable ways — and an aftermath in which the arrogance and imperiousness of a local football program left many trying to cover for the boys responsible for the prolonged attack — it’s despicable to slobber all over the tears you can see rather giving due deference to the grievous wounds you can’t.

There’s nothing wrong with pointing out the tragedy of young lives that went horribly astray, or the systemic corruption that didn’t simply allow it to happen but encouraged it, or the greater lesson about what’s expected of boys and men who live in a civilized society in which women are to be respected rather than treated as objects, or what the entire case says about kids and the culture of self-exhibitionism in the internet age. All of these are worthwhile subjects for discussion in the wake of what may be just the first trial to come out of the Steubenville rape case. But none of these is the main subject.

The main subject, particularly in the immediate aftermath of this verdict, is the victim. Just because she can’t be seen doesn’t mean her presence shouldn’t be heard and felt. That’s the job of a journalist: to give voice to the voiceless. It’s not to fall back on the easy emotion that any idiot can put a camera on and stick a microphone in front of. That’s just being lazy. And, in this case, damn unethical.

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I get that as in every other field of modern entertainment, when it comes to TV news, a rumor is just a rumor. I also get that a rumor generated by The New York Post is often even less than a rumor. But given what we’ve seen lately, particularly what we witnessed last week from the network, the rumor that Soledad O’Brien is on her way out at CNN sounds anything but implausible.

The Post’s “Page Six” is reporting that CNN is now in the final stages of a deal that would move Erin Burnett to mornings beside Chris Cuomo; the result would be a morning show more in line with new CNN boss Jeff Zucker’s Today show sensibilities and less the go-for-the-throat determination of O’Brien’s Starting Point, which has drawn praise from critics for its willingness to push back against anyone expecting to come on the show and ram political talking points down the public’s throat uninterrupted.

In the past, I’ve made no bones about my dislike for Zucker; I think he’s a self-satisfied hack whose arrogant incompetence and penchant for clever gimmicks and quick-fixes were what practically destroyed NBC from the inside out and may very well have put it in a position where its foundation is so weak that it will take years to ever be truly competitive again. But I admit that I’ve watched his burgeoning era at CNN with some fascination because he made a couple of decisions early on which seemed to suggest that he was going to handle the CNN brand with care and maybe even work toward cleaning up its formerly untarnished reputation as the cable network for real news. Sure, he’d said right off the bat that he wanted to “broaden the definition of what news is,” and that he considered other cable channels besides the direct competition to be targets for CNN to set its sights on, bringing to mind images of weekend coverage hosted by Honey Boo Boo and Guy Fieri. But he also hired Jake Tapper and summarily fired half of the network’s stable of jabbering political pundits, which I felt had to be worth something.

Over the past couple of weeks, though, Zucker has made it crystal clear what his priorities will be for CNN under his reign, what he wants in terms of coverage and what we can expect the network to look and sound like moving forward. First came word that his former co-conspirator in attempting to ruin the reputation of NBC beyond repair, Steve Capus, might be coming to CNN’s news department now that he’s finally, mercifully out at NBC. And then, of course, came the Cruise to Shit Island — the nightmare onboard the Carnival Triumph.

As with all silly Zucker wizardry, the nonstop, utterly surreal live coverage of the Carnival ship that had become stranded in the Gulf created a brief ratings spike, if for no other reason than the fact that it was so insane it compelled you to keep watching. But make no mistake: again as with all silly Zucker wizardry, long-term, it and manufactured stories like it will severely damage CNN. It’s one thing to appreciate that a stricken cruise ship makes for a great picture or that stories of vacations ruined by the smell of sewage can translate into first world problems CNN’s prime demographic can identify with. But to dare to call the Carnival Triumph a “disaster,” to offensively equate it to Katrina, and to make it seem as if, after four days at sea with no power on a luxury-liner, it turned into Lord of the Flies-style savagery, with horny college kids beating pensioners to death with the arms of slot machines, then eating them for sustenance — like the clean-up crews were going to board the ship and find that the dark interior state room hallways look like what the Colonial Marines found at Hadley’s Hope in Aliens — well, that’s deserving of every bit of mockery it drew from every direction.

But now, on top of all that, comes the possibility that Zucker will allow not only one of CNN’s most respected names but someone he worked closely with in the past to walk off mornings and out the door. In favor of lightweight eye candy like Erin Burnett, no less. Having worked closely with Soledad myself, on CNN’s American Morning, I can tell you that she’s not simply a professional and a pretty damn great all-around person but someone who brings talents to the table that very few others do. She’s proven herself time and time again at CNN and I’m hoping that the Post’s story really is a rumor and nothing more.

If Zucker continues to take CNN in this direction, though — into the realm of 24/7 nonsense coverage and a management populated with the cronies of failures past — then maybe Soledad would be wise to get out. A couple of months back, she told The New York Times Magazine, “I’m fairly confident that I’m not going to be cooking salmon and doing fashion shows on CNN,” meaning that she wasn’t the right person for that kind of thing should CNN go there. Well, it may be going there. And she’s not the right kind of person for that kind of thing.

I’d rather see Zucker make CNN what Soledad O’Brien is suited for than see Soledad have to leave because it’s not.

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First there was the news that may have come as a surprise to most reasonable people, but which honestly was all-but-assured to those who understand how the corporate world works: the hiring of Jeff Zucker as the new head of CNN Worldwide. Sure, pretty much everyone with a pair of eyes knew that Zucker had almost singlehandedly ruined NBC and by all accounts should’ve been radioactive for the next century or so, yet anybody experienced in dealing with modern American corporatism knows that there’s a mob-style “blood in, blood out” thing that happens at the upper echelons of power and once you’ve been accepted into the club, with a few exceptions, you’re there to stay. Zucker has name-recognition and an adeptness at personal PR that borders on sorcery when you consider everything he manages to get people to conveniently forget about him, so the thoroughly offensive decision to give him another shot at running a television network was a punch telegraphed from a mile away.

Now, in the wake of that decision, of course, comes a series of thunderous declarations by Zucker meant to let everyone know that he’s ready and willing to start putting his mark on CNN. A couple of weeks back, in his initial address to the troops from, I’d imagine, the balcony of Casa Rosada, Zucker offered up a new mission statement that should’ve sent chills down the back of anybody who thinks CNN can and should be the best news network on television.

“I think our competition today is anybody that competes for eyeballs and attention and produces non-fiction programming. News is about more than politics and war, we need to broaden that definition of what news is, while maintaining the standards of CNN’s journalistic excellence.”

In case Zuck’s not making it clear enough, allow me to translate. Basically what he’s saying, or at least what I’m afraid he’s saying, is that he sees outlets like TLC, E!, Bravo and the Food Network as direct competition to CNN, given that they produce “non-fiction” — in other words, reality — programming. Zucker, as master of the gimmicky quick-fix, wouldn’t see a thing wrong with the publicity generated by turning CNN into a thoroughly branded reality-based network, one where the whole “journalistic excellence” thing, as it did in his statement, comes last. If you have visions of Honey Boo Boo guest co-hosting the new Get It Up, America! weekend morning show on CNN, I honestly don’t think they’re that far off from what may actually happen.

Speaking of mornings, if there’s one one thing Jeff Zucker has proven himself to be a genius at — provided you believe the comically hagiographic, largely self-generated Zucker mythology the media press seems to revel in dispensing — it’s morning television. Yes, Zucker deserves credit for his successful run as executive producer of the Today show, but it’s worth pointing out that he wound up setting in motion the machinery that would eventually be the show’s undoing. He was big on fluff, big on “event programming” and big on style over substance, all of which had a limited shelf life built into its DNA. Now Zucker is letting information leak which would seem to indicate that he’s planning to make some major changes to CNN mornings.

According to one report, Zucker is looking at the comely but insufferable Erin Burnett as a possible morning show host, paired with a male anchor to be named later. It’s a pretty standard dynamic, one that shows almost no vision, but if his hope is to create a Today show-style goof-fest then that’s certainly one way to do it. Soledad O’Brien currently hosts part of CNN’s morning lineup and she’s drawn raves lately for her tough, take-no-shit interview style; she used to work with Zucker years ago and has sung his praises recently but if this report is true, there’s a strong possibility she’d be pushed aside in favor of Burnett, which is a journalistic travesty.

Either way, the bottom line is that Zucker’s back making it clear that he’ll be doing what he spent a good portion of his CEO tenure doing at, or to, NBC: screwing it up. He imploded in such spectacular fashion during his last go-round that it still seems incomprehensible anyone would give him another bite at the apple, but again, this is corporate television we’re talking about. As everybody knows, while it defies the laws of occupational physics that govern the rest of us, when you’re a big corporate guy at the top, there’s nowhere to fail but upward.

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Holding a job down in the corporate news media is more of a lottery than a talent

By Chez Pazienza: I used to have a motto that I lived by when it came to the notion of job security in the TV news business — it’s one I’d pass along to the various rising stars coming up through the ranks whenever the winds of change were gathering in the corner offices of the newsroom: Management is always behind you 100% — right up until the second they put their hand against your back and push you out the door. It pretty much goes without saying that no matter the field you work in, you can’t put absolute faith in corporate’s absolute faith in you, but in mainstream television news that’s a fact you have to always keep in the front of your mind or risk being blindsided at the worst possible moment.

You can be on top of the world one day and pounding the pavement looking for a new job the next — and most managers are so adept at bloodletting that they can make sure you’ll never see or hear the bullet that ultimately kills you. While this is a fact of life in the modern media, with decisions behind the scenes mimicking the rapid fire cycle of information going out to the audience, it can make for a truly volatile work environment.

With that in mind, it should surprise no one that poor Savannah Guthrie took over the Today show a couple of weeks ago with a very big target already tattooed on her back. Thus is the presumption of a career lived on borrowed time that NBC has sown following a few very high-profile, publicly embarrassing dismissals over the past year-and-a-half. It started with Conan O’Brien, who was handed The Tonight Show only to have it taken back after a mere seven months to make way for the return of the insufferable Jay Leno; following that was the entirely timely firing of NBC Universal CEO and Head Hack-in-Charge Jeff Zucker; then came Ann Curry’s ouster from the Today show after fourteen years in the opening credits but just one year as a main anchor.

While Zucker’s boot-to-the-ass was much deserved, it’s a safe bet that neither Conan nor Curry believed that they were on Double Secret Probation from the moment they accepted their respective promotions. The banishing of all three proves that NBC has no issue looking like an organization that’s anything but organized, but two of the sacks make it glaringly apparent that when it comes to talent specifically, NBC’s management is made up of a bunch of knee-jerks who live in constant fear of any sort of ratings slide and react without focus or a long-term plan, always eager to find the nearest scapegoat to sacrifice. It’s the furthest thing from the kind of smart, slow-burn ethos I was taught to abide by during my time in the NBC family almost fifteen years ago.

All of this brings us back to Savannah Guthrie, who took over the co-anchor reins at Today, with much fanfare, all of a month ago and was promptly beat on her first day out by the show’s arch-nemesis, Good Morning America. The recent, gradual ratings gain by GMA was the supposed reason that Ann Curry had to go, making way for Guthrie’s ascendance, and it doesn’t seem to be letting up now that a talent change has been made at the top.

Enter Hoda Kotb and a new controversy that threatens to once again return NBC and its desperate inability to make a decision and stick with it back to their rightful place in the public eye. The New York Daily News claims, and is maintaining, that Kotb is being parachuted into London as an emergency measure to help save Today’s flagging Olympics coverage. (Last Thursday, even with NBC’s entire morning team reporting from London, GMA still managed to handily whip Today.) The rumor is that the NBC management types are hoping that Kotb’s coffee-klatchy — wine-klatchy? — demeanor will give a little juice to what’s truly been a lackluster series of shows out of England. All this would seem to suggest that Savannah Guthrie might want to start preparing her tearful goodbye speech now.

NBC of course is denying that it’s at all disappointed with the coverage Today has been offering and it insists that Kotb’s trip to London is routine and has been in the planning stages for weeks. There may actually be some validity to that second claim, given that Kotb mentioned the possibility of going to London for the network on-air three weeks ago. But that’s not really the point. The point is that NBC has created, all on its own, a climate where it’s easy to imagine that there’s a Boschian room full of suits somewhere in the bowels of 30 Rock tearing their eyes out over what they’re seeing on-air and shouting out increasingly desperate quick-fixes designed to stop the hemorrhaging of numbers. NBC’s got no one to blame but itself for its current reputation for reflexive, near sociopathic decision-making in the face of perceived ratings disaster — so it makes perfect sense that rumors of the upcoming death of Savannah Guthrie, however greatly exaggerated, could have at least some merit. This is what you get when you play musical chairs with your people and screw with their lives like it’s no big deal, then badmouth them publicly once they’re out of earshot.

All television organizations these days, particularly TV news departments, are well-versed in the not-so-subtle art of Panic Programming. It’s the reason shows move from time slot to time slot and come and go after only a couple of episodes; it’s why freshly minted golden boys and girls become back-alley dumpster dwellers in a matter of a few weeks; it’s why magic bullets are always sought to save the day instead of steady hands to guide things forward. But nobody has the kind of masterful touch that NBC does when it comes to upending the entire product and dumping powerful people in a tornado of bad PR — and that’s because it’s willing to take the hit publicly because it knows both that the audience will eventually get over it and that there will always be an abundance of good people waiting in the wings for their chance to try to be the standout the network can’t get rid of. I can’t help but wonder if Savannah Guthrie thinks she’s one of those people — or if she’s a nervous wreck, contemplating whether her days are already numbered.

Some people obviously think they are. And NBC’s recent history of pumping bright rays of sunshine up its stars’ asses only to turn around and show them the door in short order is what’s responsible for that belief.

NBC says it’s fully behind Savannah Guthrie. Uh-huh. I’ve heard that before.

In the words of the good Doctor: Don’t blink, Savannah.

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This week at The Daily Banter, we looked at Mitt Romney's bold plan to tax the poor, and looked at a disturbing reason why Republicans believe in doing this. We asked why the GOP Presidential candidate wants to cut jobs for Fireman, teachers and the police, and unfortunately spend much of the week attacking Salon.com's Glenn Greenwald: Ben Cohen's piece here, Bob Cesca's here, and Chez Pazienza's here. Outside of politics, Chez Pazienza discussed the perplexing return disastrous former NBC boss Jeff Zucker to the television big leagues, and Bob Cesca wrote a fascinating piece about Lance Armstrong's suspension for alleged drug use.

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Jeff Zucker: Failing upwards (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

By Chez Pazienza: Here’s a little something just about everyone in the television business knows: Once you become a high-powered executive, it’s almost impossible to fuck yourself and your reputation so badly that you’ll never work again.

Let’s say you’re some poor mid-level schmuck, doing whatever it is you do right now for a living, and you almost single-handedly make, let’s say, some gargantuan mistake that turns your company into a worldwide laughingstock and threatens to crater an upcoming multi-million dollar merger that’s going to make it the most powerful organization of its kind in the world — there’s a pretty good chance you’ll be radioactive for about the next hundred or so years. Not in television, though — and not if you’re an executive.

Case in point: Jeff Zucker, the former boy wonder of NBC Universal whose breathtaking arrogance and bottomless reservoir of short-sighted quick fixes and dumb-ass gimmickry turned the once-mighty NBC into a perennial last-place loser and whose name became synonymous with epic failure. It was Zucker who was personally responsible for the now legendary clusterfuck that turned NBC’s prime time inside out, led to an affiliate rebellion and eventually culminated in the ugly public departure of Conan O’Brien, all in the name of keeping Jay Leno fat, happy and, most importantly, safely in place at the network. Zucker ultimately left NBC in disgrace, but the important thing to remember is that disgrace is a stench that washes off damn quickly in the amoral world of the television suit.

Zucker’s got name recognition. And he’s got a reputation for putting clever ways of bringing in revenue above actually putting decent programming on the air — and that’s really all anybody cares about anymore in TV. Which is why his name is apparently now being bandied about as a possible candidate for not one but two stratospheric television news positions. Turner President Phil Kent is reportedly considering Zucker as a replacement for CNN Worldwide CEO Jim Walton, whose contract is up in December; Walton’s renewal is on very shaky ground in the wake of an almost staggering drought of ratings, with CNN pulling in record low numbers for months now. Meanwhile, Tribune Co. might also be considering Zucker to help lead the company out of its own wasteland, one brought on by a 2008 Chapter 11 filing that it’s now trying to emerge from.

Actually, the Tribune job would at least make a minor amount of sense given that Zucker’s forte is conjuring short-lived financial success out of thin air through the implementation of all kinds of silly schemes, cheap on-air trickery and relentless cross-pollination. But when it comes to CNN, here’s the thing: The network is already making money. In fact — it’s still turning an impressive profit even as its ratings tank. CNN could easily not worry one bit about how many people are watching it because it’s feeding off plenty of healthy revenue streams besides the traditional ones cultivated by good ratings. Obviously, though, CNN has a reputation to uphold and being the number three cable news network doesn’t exactly jibe with how it’s been perceived in the past and how it would like to be perceived now and going forward — but bringing somebody like Zucker on board to try to bring in those ratings seems more than a little misguided.

Either way, it looks like we haven’t seen the last of Jeff Zucker. You could’ve predicted from the beginning that there would always be somebody willing to put his special brand of spoiled milk back in the refrigerator in the hope that it’d taste better later. That’s just how things work in corporate television.

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