You know what, i'll even provide you with why the affiliates wanted him canceled.
Just how bad was NBC's prime-time experiment with Jay Leno for local stations' newscasts?
If a study released this week by Harmelin Media is to be believed, the answer is more than $22 million bad. That’s how much stations would have lost in three months had the network continued to air a show NBC executives (still) dub financially savvy. "It was working at acceptable levels financially," NBC Universal Television Entertainment Chairman Jeff Gaspin told reporters on Sunday. "So we were actually making money at 10 o’clock." The same cannot be said for NBC's 10 owned and operated stations. According to the media research firm, with Leno as their lead-in, those stations' newscasts were poised to lose somewhere in the neighborhood of $570,000 per week, or $7.4 million per quarter.
It's small wonder NBC's local stations put pressure on the network: the disgruntled 210 local stations' late news viewership plummeted in the key 25- to 54-year-old demographic by an average of 25% in November, compared to the same period a year earlier, says the report. Still worse, in the major markets of New York and Los Angeles, the ratings free-falls clocked in at 48% and 43%, respectively.
http://blogs.forbes.com/bizblog/2010/01/14/the-leno-effect/
