Word: zucker
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
When he became their boss, some wags at the Today show predictably dubbed him Miles Silverberg. Jeff Zucker, the 26-year-old wunderkind who was named Today's executive producer last December, just smiles at being compared to the frenetic, baby-faced producer on Murphy Brown. "I think Miles is more uptight than I am," he says...
Uptight is hardly a word to apply to Zucker these days. Try upbeat. After three years of soap-opera travails and ratings woes, NBC's morning show has almost miraculously righted itself. Katie Couric, who became co-anchor a year ago, has managed to make people forget the short, unhappy tenure of Deborah Norville. Bryant Gumbel, the show's sometimes testy on-air leader for the past decade, is smiling more. And the audience is filing back into the auditorium. Though Good Morning America retains a narrow lead in the ratings, Today scored a weekly win last month...
...quite a feat for TV's newest overachiever, who rose through the Today-show ranks in a scant three years. "He is creative, has wonderful news judgment and wants to win," says NBC News president Michael Gartner. "And he happens to be 26." Couric also dismisses any notion that Zucker's youth poses a problem. "He's very intelligent, and he has a real respect for history -- even if he wasn't around when it was made...
...Zucker -- whose thinning hair and coolly confident manner make him seem at least, well, 30 -- has put his stamp on the Today show in ways both predictable and unpredictable. The sometimes stodgy program (Good Morning America still gets more of the young female viewers most prized by advertisers) has started to loosen up, booking hipper musical guests like Color Me Badd, Marc Cohn and Curtis Stigers. It has also been more aggressive on breaking news: the morning after Mike Tyson's rape conviction, for example, Today devoted much of its first half-hour to the trial, with prosecuting attorney Gregory...
...house a growing settler population. But it is really meant to strengthen the Jewish state's claim to the territories prior to any negotiations. If Shamir can stall long enough, he hopes to make Israel's presence in the territories irreversible before peace talks even begin. Says Dedi Zucker, a left-wing Knesset member: "The idea is simply to destroy any chance that Israel will have to give up land for peace...