Here’s an excerpt from the remarks of NBC News president Steve Capus at the TCA press tour on Friday:
| CAPUS: NBC News is doing a fantastic job these days all across the board. I look at the ‘Today’ show, and I see an absolutely strong franchise that — Katie left two months ago, and you’ve seen people like Natalie Morales and Campbell Brown and Ann Curry and David Gregory and Lester Holt step in there, and that really shows the strength of the news division. They’ve come in and more than held their own all throughout the summer, and we’re in fantastic position as we head into September when Meredith Vieira comes on board. We can’t wait for that. ‘Nightly’ continues to be in a very strong position. We’ll talk more about that shortly. MSNBC, MSNBC.com, ‘Dateline,’ ‘Meet the Press,’ this is a fantastic and very strong news division, and I know success is sometimes a boring story, but I’ll take it. I’d like to have that boring story all the time that I’m in this job. |
> Also: Capus thinks the cable news wars are “silly.” He said: “There’s a lot of talk back and forth about somebody being up by a hundred thousand or this or that. The fact is MSNBC is such an important part of this news division, and to me, that’s a bigger story of MSNBC than that type of hype and ratings silliness… Brian’s been all over it this past week-and-a-half in primetime and, you know, Lester Holt and Andrea Mitchell, David Gregory. So that, to me, is more important. And that doesn’t get any attention, and we don’t send out press releases saying, ‘Hey, take a look at that.’ But that’s the reality, and the reality is a very strong one for NBC News.”