What Do Zucker, Klein Firings Have In Common?

It was certainly no surprise to read that Jeff Zucker's new Comcast bosses gave him the ax, since the NBC Universal chief executive had presided over a series of high-profile debacles, notably the hiring of Ben Silverman to run NBC, the network's precipitous drop into last place, the whole Conan O'Brien-Jay Leno late-night disaster and the long run of executive turmoil and box-office flops at Universal Pictures.

Nor is it any surprise to learn that CNN U.S. President Jon Klein is out today as well, after failing to figure out how to stop the cable news channel's continuing ratings slide. But what do the two events have in common?

It's yet another example of how quickly the public has lost its loyalty to what were once dominant mainstream showbiz brands.

The most startling statistic Patrick Goldstein of the latimes.com saw in the stories about Zucker wasn't that NBC Universal generated roughly $2.3 billion in profits last year; it was how little NBC figured into the revenue picture: 80% of those profits came from the company's cable division.

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