From KCRW in Santa Monica, this is The Treatment.

Welcome to The Treatment. I'm Elvis Mitchell. You can also with a show at KCRW.com.

New York Times television reporter Bill Carter has an interesting perspective on television.

In his books, The Late Shift, Desperate Networks, and his newest, The War for Late Night.

He's looked at his TV as a culture.

A culture doesn't realize it's dying before its very eyes.

In every single case, he's looked at the networks, not being able to see what's happening to them because they're

so basically caught up in the day-to-day politics. His new book, The War for Late Night

is a sequel to the Late Ship, which dealt with the late-night wars. Bill, first of all, welcome

back to the show. Great to be with you, Ellis. Each one of these books you've done has been

about the fact that these executives can't see five minutes into the future because they're so busy

dealing with the politics of day-to-day television. Yes, and really they're all worried about

their own jobs disappearing any minute because they're under such pressure and they're being

judged constantly and they don't really feel like they have any security whatsoever. In this case, one of the odd things was they tried to see five years down the road,

which is unaccountable in television to think that you're going to know what's going to happen in five years.

But they decided it would guarantee Conan O'Brien the Tonight Show five years in advance because they didn't want to lose him.

And then when time came,

they had to give Jay Leno to 10 o'clock time period

because they didn't want to lose him.

And it was really, everything was being done

in a defensive way, not in an offensive way.

They were all figuring out why.

...