03 March 2006

Let's get Howard coming and going

CBS wants to have its cake and eat it too... after more than a year of holding Howard to fulfilling his contract and making him stay on the air, now they're suing him for what he said while on 'their' air - that is, promoting satellite radio, his eventual move to Sirius in particular. Vaguespace gets it right - CBS Radio has a bad case of sour grapes; “I’m the one who kept you on the air and I knew I could sue you afterwards,” Stern says Les Moonves told him.
Add CBS Radio's desperate need for some misdirection (as John Travolta says in Swordfish, "Houdini could make an elephant disappear in the middle of a theater filled with people, and do you know how he did that? Misdirection, Stanley, misdirection.") from their falling ratings (I'm sorry, did we say "falling"? We meant "catatstrophically plummeting") - what better way to move an elephant than to hide behind Howard's publicity and persona - it's larger than life, and it's certainly larger than their ratings.
CBS, move on... all you're doing now is providing MORE free publicity for Howard on Sirius, and cementing the perception that your radio programming is nothing without him (which, although maybe true, is not really the message you want to focus on sending, now is it?)

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