Watch David Letterman's Tuesday night desk segment on the late night wars and you'll laugh your pants off. Then watch Leno's own clips from the same night (they're mercifully short) on the same page as he takes digs at Letterman and looks like he's about to take one at Conan O'Brien.

They're cold, they're not funny, and even Leno's own audience starts to boo as they see the Letterman/O'Brien punchlines coming. He's lost his own studio audience in this matter. And NBC still thinks he's going to return The Tonight Show to dominance?

Last week, I mentioned that the donation page at http://american.redcross.org/supporthaiti did not actually pledge to use any of the funds you donated in Haiti. Per long-standing ARC bait-and-switch tactics, those donations went to the general “international relief fund” that may have been spent in Haiti, or some other country, or not at all—a pattern the ARC has repeated with disasters for decades. Disaster strikes, collect money on it, spend very little of the money on relief for that disaster. As the official sister of this blog explained in 2004:

The September 11 scandal was not unique. Earlier that same year in San Diego, ARC spent only $7000 of over $400,000 donated for relief in the Alpine wildfires. Then in October, 2001, while collecting millions across the country for WTC relief, ARC spent less than 10 percent of earmarked money for wildfire relief as it should have been spent (and that may be generous, because there was almost no accounting done). ARC spent $3.9 million for wildfire relief efforts in 2003, and their accounting was better. But as late as October of last year, ARC refused to designate monies donated for wildfire relief to help the very people the money was supposed to help. It begs the question: How much money was actually donated for this relief in 2001, if so much more was accounted for in 2003? What kind of charity has administrative expenses of 33 percent?

Sadly, all three of the links involved are now not only dead, but not even in the Internet Wayback Machine. I read them at the time, though, and they support the points she made. ARC collects monies based on disasters, but puts them in general funds that then don’t get spent on those disasters. The language on the “Donate to Haiti” page last week was quite clear (to ARC’s benefit) that you were donating to the “International Disaster Relief Fund,” and that if you wanted it earmarked for Haiti, you had to either mail a check or walk it to your local Red Cross office and make sure they wrote down “Haiti earthquake relief only” to designate the funds. Otherwise, they’d spend (or not spend) it as they saw fit.

With today’s Indie+Relief effort from independent Mac software developers donating their proceeds today to various charities for Haiti disaster relief (including the ARC), I took another look at the Red Cross’s page. Lo and behold, the text has changed. It now says:

Your gift to the American Red Cross will support emergency relief and recovery efforts to help those people affected by the earthquake in Haiti. Assistance provided by the American Red Cross may include deploying personnel, sending relief supplies, and providing financial resources.

This still not saying that 100% of the money will go to Haiti, but it’s worlds ahead of last week’s statement that flat-out said the money might not go to Haiti relief at all. Similarly, I see that the Doctors Without Borders link in the earlier blog entry (and in this blog’s sidebar) now takes you to a page that says you’re donating to DWB’s “Emergency Relief Fund,” and it is similarly clear that the money might not be spent in Haiti. Last week at this time, the same link destination mentioned only Haiti.

To a degree, this is understandable: if the charities think they’ve already collected all they will need to spend to fulfill their mission in Haiti (like rebuilding hospitals and several months of emergency medical aid, in the case of DWB), it’s prudent but a bit off-putting to start directing donations into a “Haiti-Plus” fund in case something goes drastically wrong somewhere else tomorrow. And it makes more sense to do it in that order than to pull the what the ARC did, which is to direct it to the general fund first and only later start collecting Haiti-specific funds.

But the situation has reversed somewhat, and I should mention as much. Consider yourself informed.

It’s all but a done deal that Conan O’Brien will produce his last show on NBC in three days, and no later than after the Winter Olympics, The Tonight Show with Jay Leno will be back at 10:35 PM to fail spectacularly because Leno is both unfunny and damaged goods.

Leno and NBC both seem to be catching on to the latter part, because they’re doing damage control. From a recent New York Times story:

Mr. Leno described the series of events that led to his situation; they began in 2004 when, he said, an NBC executive came to his office and said the network wanted him to step down from “The Tonight Show” in five years even though he was still first in the ratings at that time. (Watch Mr. Leno’s on-air announcement from 2004 here.)

Mr. Leno said he agreed to the plan based on his unwillingness to “go through what we went through the last time,” when NBC chose him over David Letterman as host of “Tonight.”

At the end of the five-year period, he said, he was still No. 1 and NBC suggested he move to prime time after showing him charts and graphs indicating the audience would follow him to the 10 p.m. time period. …

OK, we need to interrupt here because this is, at best, half-true. Two and a half years ago, Leno staffers were making it known publicly that he wanted to renege on the deal. (You’d think the New York Times would know this because they linked to the piece.) Leno spent about a year before the announcement of his prime-time show openly threatening to move to FOX or ABC, just as he did in his monologue two weeks ago on the day it was clear his failure of a prime-time show would finally be terminated. NBC “suggested” he move to prime time because Leno had been threatening, in public, to go to another network and compete with The Tonight Show.

He’s not the “good soldier” here. Continuing with the current article:

He said that NBC had given him a two-year contract for the 10 p.m. slot. Now, he said, four months later, because of problems with NBC’s affiliated stations and low ratings, network executives informed him they were canceling his show but “told me you’re still valuable.”

“I said, I’m still valuable? You fired me twice.” The network asked him to move back to 11:35 for a half-hour show, with Mr. O’Brien to follow at 12:05 with “The Tonight Show.”

Mr. Leno said he asked whether Mr. O’Brien would go along with this plan and was told that NBC was sure that he would.

Mr. Leno said he agreed to the change—as he had to the move to prime time—because he wanted to protect the jobs of his staff members. …

OK, again, here we have a slight problem with reality.

Leno’s staffers were mostly those who worked on his Tonight Show, where Leno also lived before he got The Tonight Show (he was Johnny Carson’s “permanent guest host”). It’s a safe bet that most or all of the staffers already lived in Southern California then, much less now.

Conan O’Brien’s staff moved to Los Angeles, moved their families, bought homes, and moved their kids to new schools to take up the Tonight Show mantle less than one year ago. (Late Night with Conan O’Brien went off the air in February 2009; The Tonight Show with Conan O’Brien started in late May. Late Night with Jimmy Fallon was ready to go in February 2009 because they had been preparing it for a year in Studio 6B, compared to Conan’s Studio 6A, now used for The Dr. Oz Show. No, I’m not kidding.)

Who do you think has a rougher time: the people who have lived in L.A. for 20 years who seek new work because a prime-time show got cancelled (as about 15 prime-time shows do each year), or the people who just moved from New York to Los Angeles on what seemed like the safest bet in television? The delay in announcing the end of Conan’s time at NBC is that he’s negotiating for more money for his displaced staff members, while NBC is now publicly bad-mouthing him for doing so.

According to Mr. Leno, the network learned that Mr. O’Brien would not accept the shift but he said he does not blame Mr. O’Brien at all, calling him “a gentleman and a good family guy.” He said he had never had any animosity toward Mr. O’Brien.

He added that the network’s decisions were driven by the fact that neither host had succeeded in the ratings and that NBC expected “us to help him and we didn’t.”

Again, a lie from Leno: Conan’s ratings are about what Leno’s were when he started, adjusted for the fact that for the first year-plus, Leno had no competition in late night. (The Tonight Show with Jay Leno started on May 25, 1992; The Late Show with David Letterman premiered on August 30, 1993.) And what’s more, Leno said as much publicly not six months ago:

As for his successor, Mr. Leno said NBC should not be worried at all about the early performance of Conan O’Brien on the “Tonight Show.”

“Conan is going through exactly the same thing I went through,” Mr. Leno said. He recalled being lambasted after he had been on for only a couple of months and the show went off for coverage of the Olympics. “ ‘I hope he never comes back,’ ” he said, recalling the kinds of comments directed toward him.

“Everybody goes through this,” Mr. Leno said. “It’s a rite of passage when you take over the ‘Tonight Show.’ ”

The only difference is that Johnny Carson had enough class to not take the prime-time gig when Leno’s manager forced him into retirement (yes, NBC offered), and to not try to take The Tonight Show back after 7 months.

This notion that Leno is just a good soldier who’s doing what the network says forgets the simple truth that Leno could say no. As Kimmel put it, he’s got like $800 million in the bank, and still does like 160 stand-up gigs per year to give him all the money he lives on, including for his Detroit-sized car collection. He led the late-night wars for about 14 years and does not have to go to whatever time-slot NBC tells him. He could just say no.

Obviously he’s not doing that, so either…

1. NBC is so truly unaware of how unfunny Leno is to anyone under 55, or so desperate for short-term ratings at the cost of long-term irrelevance, that they’re truly throwing everything they have at him to get him to stay, or

 

2. Leno is still threatening NBC to go to FOX or ABC (although ABC has said they don’t want Conan, they were always interested in Leno) if they don’t keep him on the air five nights per week, or

3. NBC executives are trying to destroy the company to profit from some illegal scam with Comcast or another buyer, or

4. Leno has photographs of Jeff Zucker with JonBenet Ramsey’s body.

None of these reflect well on NBC or Leno, and none of them leave Leno as the “good guy” he’s now presenting himself in a belated attempt to repair his shattered reputation. It doesn’t matter if he engineered this coup or not (though it still looks possible, and maybe even probable), because he could have ended it at any time by saying “No, I’m done, give Conan his chance.”

He obviously will not do that and wants everyone to forget it. I don’t think people will forget that, though. No one’s organized any protests in favor of Jay Leno, ever, anywhere. Younger viewers are through with Leno. They were starting to love Conan, so NBC is taking him off the air.

Conan’s blood may be on Jeff Zucker’s hands, but it splattered onto Jay Leno’s face. Good luck getting that damned spot out, Lady MacChin.