Allison Miller
Intro to Mass Comm
The students of the University of Iowa have expressed much annoyance over the topic of late-night. The feud between NBC, Jay Leno, and Conan O’Brien has been ongoing for months. It seems there is no end. Will this controversy hurt NBC’s ratings? There is much speculation that NBC could be hurting, due to the poor handling of this situation, once the late-night series is altered. This controversy is covered a lot in the media, which reaches out to a lot of students. What side are the students on? To decide if this topic was of much importance to them, we released a poll to approximately 1600 undergraduate students. 201 responses were received back.
According to the poll, 182 students were aware of the conflict and only 15 of them were unaware completely. This is interesting because of how much press this conflict received. It is important to realize that not every person watches the news or cares about public issues, especially ones that are minor in the world.
It looks like bad news for NBC, 54.5% of the students polled believed NBC’s ratings would be affected negatively. Only a miniscule 12.1% thought there would be a positive effect, leaving 32.8% to having no effect, and .5% to another category. One student’s suggestion for improving these ratings, “I would have gone back in time and not given Jay Leno a prime time talk show on the network; since time travel is not currently a viable option, I would have honored Conan O’Brien’s contract to be host of The Tonight Show and let Leno leave the network.” This would be a great option; however, we cannot turn back a clock. On another hand, another student states that the spot should be given “to the host with the best ratings.”
120 people polled believed Leno’s ratings would be hurt once NBC made the switch back because he had been gone for so long and people were angry with him. Many cannot wait for his return to his original time slot just to see if these stats hold true. Conan’s ratings are thought to skyrocket when he finds a new show to host. A whopping 134 polled thought Conan would not get bad ratings. We hope to see how this plays out.
Seeing as the students decided that Conan’s ratings were not going to decrease and Leno’s were thought to increase, I would have to come to the conclusion that Conan is the most favorable. Although the poll states that 97 people believe Jay Leno was favored, 87 for Conan still linger right behind. These were based solely on the publicity and the rewarded time slot to Jay Leno. Clearly, this is a huge controversy and a lot of University of Iowa students showed a lot of support through polling. Hopefully, NBC can get their stuff together so they do not lose so much money next time.
