Entertainment Weekly, which has kind of always had an air of nastiness about Jay Leno, is getting in some final shots in at him. You'd think this article called "Jay Leno deserves a dignified 'Tonight' exit" would be a lot nicer to him than it is. And just to achieve the opposite of what that article's headline says, they just ran this one, which is basically a compilation of every nasty thing they could find that anyone famous has said about the guy, carefully edited to leave out any trace of compliment.
The article's more than a little dishonest with stuff like saying people in Hollywood hate him "…because his primetime Jay Leno Show tanked, sinking Conan's Tonight Show before it had even really begun." Yeah, you could believe that if you ignored the simple fact that O'Brien started at 11:35 on June 1, 2009 and his ratings were poor and dropping well before Leno's 10 PM show started on September 14. (And come on! If there was any evidence at all that Jay's show was really sinking Conan, don't you think NBC would have gotten rid of Jay and kept Conan? There was a reason most of the affiliates demanded Jay back in that slot.)
But where the piece is really slimy is by listing things like feuds with and angry words from guys like Arsenio Hall and Dennis Miller without mentioning that those guys patched up with Jay, apologized for a lot of that and became frequent guests on his show. The Letterman quotes have also been sliced and diced. I would also question the claim that he is "…widely reviled by the majority of his peers." To prove this, they cite a couple of impressions not unlike ones done of anyone who's that big, a few competitors who Jay was beating, a few jokes that show no real animosity, Howard Stern and only a couple of other guys.
Yeah, there are people who don't like Leno. There were those, like Stern, who hated Carson. But if the author of that piece thinks there's a wide consensus among other comedians against Jay, maybe she oughta ask Jerry Seinfeld, Robin Williams, Bill Maher, Jimmy Fallon, Ellen DeGeneres, Howie Mandel, Billy Crystal and a few other names I'll think of later. Because those are Jay's peers.