The Vast Wasteland

Here is the full lowdown on the NBC 2.0 cutting floor.

Telemundo, which is owned by, NBC Universal will discontinue it's news casts in Huston, Dallas, San Antonia, San Jose, Denver, and Phenoix with a five-breau operation feeding stories to two news centers: Burbank, California for San Antonia, San Jse, and Denver and Phenoix the almost contructed Telemundo production center in Dallas for the Huston and San Ontonio. (Wait a minute, didn't Siniclar tried that before shutting it down). That's right, no local spanish news if you do not live in New York City, Chicago, and Miami.

In some of the areas affected, this means no real local news.

Here's another great article regarding this too. And another one too

MSNBC will be closing down it's Secacus,NJ branch and moving into Englewood Cliffs, NJ and Manhattan,NYC

Replacing dramas with more profitiable and easy to make reality and game shows (Great, more reality crap, but I do like Wife-Swap)

The end result, the savings will be reinvested in digital television projects that will bring in 1 billion in revenue in 2009 (Yeah, right)

But the only silverlining is that NBC will be recrduling Thursday nights with comedy's from 8pm-10pm starting november 30th

So this is what we get for the passage of the Telecommunications Act 1996, centralization, consolidation, and savings; all at the expense of the general public, the public the networks had to serve in the public interest.

Here's one quote where they show this comtempt:

Zucker noted that the rival ABC network had quietly been doing the same thing in recent years.
"We want to be sure that we continue to provide the best programming possible," Zucker said. "We just want to put the programming where we get the highest rate of return."