http://abcnews.go.com/Entertainment/wireStory?id=9555450
“”...a study emerged Wednesday illustrating just how damaging Leno’s prime-time show was to NBC’s local stations.
The research firm Harmelin Media said local NBC stations saw their late news audience drop by an average of 25 percent in November compared with the previous year among 25- to 54-year-old viewers. That’s the demographic upon which news advertising rates are based.
The decline was particularly steep in some of the largest markets: 48 percent in New York, 43 percent in Los Angeles and 47 percent in Philadelphia...
“We all knew it was going to go down,” Shimkus said. “But I don’t think anyone forecast anything in the neighborhood of 40 to 50 percent.”
Harmelin used data on the number of ads run in late local news programs and their cost to calculate that over a three-month period, the Leno experiment would cost these stations collectively $22 million. The 10 stations that NBC owns and operates would lose something like $570,000 per week, the report said.””
Could it simply be that the MSM network news has become irrelevant? Maybe the ratings declines had nothing to do these so-called comedians, but more to do with the overall decline in MSM relevance. Just saying.