Peter Kafka

Recent Posts by Peter Kafka

Conan Who? NBC Disappears “The Tonight Show” From the Web.

Remember the whole Conan O’Brien/Jay Leno imbroglio from last month? Perhaps NBC wishes you didn’t. The GE (GE) unit has removed every episode of the show’s seven-month run from its NBC.com site, as well as Hulu, the site NBC owns with News Corp.’s (NWS) Fox and Disney’s (DIS) ABC.

A little odd, given that a couple of days ago, the network was offering every single “Tonight Show” episode O’Brien had taped on NBC.com. But then again, everything about this story has been odd. NBC declined to comment.

NBC–at least, I’m assuming it’s NBC–has also been aggressive about taking down Conan episodes from Google’s (GOOG) YouTube. So here’s a legally sanctioned clip from CBS (CBS) employee David Letterman discussing the whole affair:

A minor UPDATE: A sharp-eyed commenter at Gawker notes that NBC hasn’t completely excised O’Brien from its site yet. It is still running a blog for the “Horny Manatee”, a long-running bit on the show. Note, in screenshot below, the reference to the now-defunct nbc.com/conan, the “official online home of all things Conan” (click image to enlarge):

Less surprising is news that O’Brien’s image has been scrubbed, Soviet-style, from NBC’s 30 Rock headquarters.


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