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2016 Postmortem
Related: About this forumWhy NBC Should Fire Donald Trump
NBCUniversal has a relationship with Donald Trump, the long-time performance artist and host of its NBC reality competition show The Apprentice, thats strikingly similar to the one between the Donald and the Romney campaign McKay Coppins described in one of what will be one of many post-mortems of the campaign:
Among the savvy sophisticates who populated the campaign headquarters in Boston, Trump was viewed as a joke and a blowhard an outrageous figure whose fixation on Obamas birth certificate was, at once, bizarre and off-putting, according to campaign sources. But he was also popular among the very voters Romney was most concerned about winning over. And the candidates aides believed perhaps naively that if they could win his endorsement, they might be able to win the hearts of his many conservative fans. He played very well with blue-collar-type Republicans, and the campaign saw that, said one source in Trumps camp. If you have no education, and you work with your hands, you like him. Its like, Wow, if I was rich, thats how I would live! The girls, the cars, the fancy suits. His ostentatiousness is appealing to them.
For NBC, The Apprentice is a product similar to a Trump political endorsement. Its relatively cheap to buy, in part because its heavily supported by product placement. It channels the things that make Trump irritating, his presumptions of expertise, his abrasiveness, and his showmans flair, towards reasonably amusing targets. And in its Celebrity Apprentice iteration, the show pulls in stars with their own followings. For this, Trump got a $130 million contract from NBC last year. But NBC handed down that deal to Trump at the end of an awful year for the network. And now that the ratings landscapeand the political oneare very different, NBC should seriously consider if they want to stay in business with Trump, or if both he and The Apprentice have reached the end of their usefulness.
The Apprentice is probably near the end of its natural lifespan as a show anyway. Its celebrity editions are drawing fewer than 9 million viewers per episode, a figure that isnt bad, but also isnt strong enough to use to launch other new shows. And it pales in comparison to The Voice, which both has given NBC a platform to boost freshman success stories like Revolution and Go On, and provides an alternate revenue stream to the network in the form of music sales. As NBC solidifies its revitalized brand, and as non-musical competition shows increasingly show their age, the network should consider Trump and The Apprentice both in the context of the larger primetime environment and with an eye towards the special headaches Trump brings in his wake.
http://thinkprogress.org/alyssa/2012/11/13/1164271/nbc-donald-trump-the-apprentice/
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Why NBC Should Fire Donald Trump (Original Post)
DonViejo
Nov 2012
OP
CreekDog
(46,192 posts)1. because why would anybody pay Trump to do what he does?