CONAN GRANTS ANOTHER INTERVIEW — TO GOOGLE

After being interviewed on CBS’s 60 Minutes and turning down requests for interviews from the likes of David Letterman and Oprah Winfrey, it was widely assumed that Conan O’Brien intended to avoid further discussions of his recent past. Such turned out to be not the case on Monday when he submitted himself to questions from Google employees during a webcast from the company’s headquarters in Mountain View, CA. Most of his comments appeared to be nothing beyond light-hearted small talk. But at one point, he credited the Internet for making him the cause célèbre that he became. “The groundswell of Internet support from lots of young people, like those in this room, took my network by surprise,” he said. “They didn’t know what hit them. Many people in broadcast TV have been dismissive of the Internet. … They tend to deride what they don’t understand.” Asked how he began using Twitter to update fans on his battle, he replied, “I was and am legally prohibited from appearing on television, radio and doing performances on the Internet. So I was just, literally, like a prisoner in a 14th-century cell writing little things on a scrap of paper and throwing them out the window and hoping a peasant goes by to find the note. So I did that and it exploded overnight.”