NBC “TODAY” AND “TONIGHT” PR CATASTROPHES ARE THE SAME, Roger Friedman posits at Showbiz411:

There’s a lot of explosive talk today about Matt Lauer leaving the Today show. It began with a New York magazine piece, continued into a second story on Deadline.com about NBC reaching out to Anderson Cooper to replace him, and has now echoed into the New York Times. The connection I still haven’t seen: that what’s going on with “Today” show this week is what happened to the “Tonight” show last week. Both shows are on NBC, and the signals being sent, however awkwardly, are coming from the same place: the new management.

As an NBC expert pointed to out to me today: Comcast wants all the old people out. I don’t mean senior citizens, although maybe that’s so. But they want a fresh look to a dead network. And that means Jay Leno and Matt Lauer. “Remember, the “New” NBC aka Comcast wants to get away from the old. Look at Fallon,” says my expert.

These seemingly chaotic changes at the networks have one thing in common: fear — and not just of ratings. (Although at bottom-dwelling NBC, that’s a big part of it.)

“A year ago Andrew Breitbart made what I thought was an absurd prediction: ‘In five years, all of this is gone. The media, all of it. Gone.’ Something like that,” Ace of Spades writes. “Well, it might not be five years, and it might not be completely gone, but ground is starting to shake beneath us. Plates are shifting. Grand houses may well fall.”

Read the whole thing. ™