Will Comcast fire NBC's Jeff Zucker? Ad execs hope so

The word on the street, according to Nikke Finke, is that Comcast will fire NBC NBC Universal President Jeff Zucker "within minutes" of Federal approval of the Comcast takeover of NBC.

That news could not come sooner for advertising executives, who are still really in a snit over Zucker's decision to green-light the failed Jay Leno Show, and the awful way Zucker handled Leno and Conan O'Brien.

On AdAge, the ad industry news publication, negative articles about Zucker are common, the most recent one calling for President Barack Obama to fire Jeff Zucker. And this article has bite:

...the man who engineered this fiasco and the general demise of NBC, Jeff Zucker (president and CEO of NBC Universal), still, bizarrely, has his job. In fact, he doesn't even really seem to fully grasp that he's at fault. When the New York Times, in a page-one, above-the-fold story, declared that "the network is in shambles" and that its "overall finances are crumbling" (from $1 billion in profit less than a decade ago, to a projected $100 million loss this year), Zucker offered the paper this defense: "We live in a society today that loves a soap opera. Three months ago it was David Letterman. Six weeks ago it was Tiger Wood's problems. Today it's NBC's problems."
Um, sure, Jeff. Tell yourself that. All of us who think you're blindingly incompetent, and have been for years, are just serial bitches and bullies who pick our targets for sport. It's merely NBC's turn, is all; this, too, will pass. Suuuure.

Ad execs blame Jeff Zucker for what they refer to as the "destruction of NBC" and most important what they see as the terrible Jay Leno Show. When it was announced that NBC would move Leno back to his old place, AdAge reported that anyone would be better than Jay Leno at 10 PM.

Ouch.

And MediaLife doesn't pull any punishes either. In a blog post that is a view of NBC from an ad buyer's perspective, Louisa Ada Seltzer writes:

The pain NBC has suffered through its mismanagement of the entire mess will remain a scar on the brand, and in the end it's really accomplished nothing in the way of fixing its primetime problem by moving Leno from the 10 p.m. timeslot, where his weeknight strip had done so poorly.

The post is followed by an unflattering survey and quotes of media buyers telling Zucker to resign or calling him an idiot, and all for his bungling of the Jay Leno Show.

But in fairness, all of this is happening in the storm of a terrible, and just recovering, economy which has been weak for two years. Zucker's actions would have been judged critically in a good economy, but in a bad one, they look like career suicide.

Stay tuned.