Cnn

Conservative columnist and commentator Robert Novak, one of the first journalists hired by CNN when it was launched 25 years ago, will not return to the news network after his contract expires Dec. 31. Novak, a central figure in the Valerie Plame leak scandal, has agreed to contribute to the Fox News Channel starting in January. CNN and Novak said the decision not to renew his contract had nothing to do with his involvement in the Plame case. Novak was the first to publish her identity as a CIA operative, in a Chicago Sun-Times column July 14, 2003.

It was a combination of on-scene savvy, technology and government agendas that resulted in CNN's exclusive live reports from Baghdad Wednesday night.But yesterday morning, when Iraqi officials shut down CNN's phone line from the Al-Rashid Hotel, it became clear that the most important factor in the cable network's reports was an apparent Iraqi decision to permit them. Anchorman Bernard Shaw said from Baghdad that the broadcasts would not have been possible without the government's blessing.

LIVE FROM BAGHDAD: GATHERING NEWS FROM GROUND ZERO.Robert Weiner.Doubleday.303 pages. $22.For years, the Cable News Network was the little guy fighting valiantly to have itself taken seriously, but it wasn't on a par with the news operations of the Big Three -- CBS, ABC and NBC. Then in a few hours on the evening of Jan. 16, 1991, it burst onto the American consciousness as a prime source for information. It left its competitors in its electronic wake by bringing the world the only live reporting of the bombing of Baghdad as the gulf war began.

WASHINGTON -- A federal judge in Miami handed back to the Cable News Network yesterday the right to make its own news decision about broadcasting tapes of ousted Panamanian leader Manuel Antonio Noriega's telephone calls from prison.Lifting a 20-day-old ban on the broadcast of seven audiotapes, U.S. District Judge William M. Hoeveler said he had decided, after reading transcripts of those tapes, that there was no need to keep them off the air any longer.He had imposed the ban at the request of lawyers defending General Noriega in a drug case pending before Judge Hoeveler.

Television viewers were dealt another emotional punch yesterday when the first videotapes of bruised and battered U.S. prisoners of war were broadcast to their living rooms.And, as a result of those troubling images, the first clear split has surfaced among TV journalists on how best to cover the gulf war.Cable News Network, which was the toast of the news industry last week for its reports from Baghdad, Iraq, was criticized by many yesterday for taking the lead in airing unedited tapes of POWs apologizing for U.S. military action in the Persian Gulf region.

To anyone watching television in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, it was obvious that of all the windswept reporters assailing the chaos, Anderson Cooper stood out. Now, the intense, silver-haired Cooper has been rewarded. CNN, the network he joined four years ago, announced yesterday that as of Monday, Cooper will be the sole anchor of its two-hour slot beginning at 10 p.m., effectively "topping off CNN's prime-time schedule" on weekdays. The network's announcement that Cooper, 38, would be its late-evening standard-bearer came in a press release that did not once mention Aaron Brown, 56, whose NewsNight show has been vaporized as a result and whose career at CNN is suddenly over.

WASHINGTON -- The Supreme Court, taking one of the rarest actions within its power, temporarily blocked the Cable News Network yesterday from broadcasting recordings of ousted Panamanian strongman Manuel Noriega's telephone calls from prison.At the same time, the court turned aside, without explanation, CNN's claim that its free press rights were violated by the temporary ban on the broadcasting of audiotapes of General Noriega talking by telephone with the legal team defending him against drug crime charges.

Every time CNN Washington correspondent Tony Collings tried to get someone on the phone yesterday, he got the same response. And it wasn't a response the veteran CNN reporter had been used to."Oh, CNN. In that case, I'll see if I can interrupt him.""I've never heard that before," said Mr. Collings, marveling at his nearly overnight rise in stock. "All you have to do is say CNN and the doors open. It's a different world."It used to be, 'CN-what? What's that?' "Since last Wednesday night, when the voices of Cable News Network correspondents Bernard Shaw, Peter Arnett and John Holliman described to the world the aerial fire show over Iraq while peering out the window of Baghdad's Al-Rashid Hotel, few have had to ask "CN-what?

Extending his efforts to return CNN to its hard-news roots and close the ratings gap on the Fox News Channel, CNN president Jon Klein yesterday announced another round of sweeping changes at the pioneering network that's celebrating its 25th anniversary. Miles O'Brien, co-anchor of CNN's Live From, will join Soledad O'Brien as co-anchor of the cable channel's American Morning show. He replaces Bill Hemmer, who is leaving CNN after 10 years, "to pursue other opportunities," according to Klein.

Too little and, quite literally, too late. That's the story on NBC News' overnight news service, "Nightside," which premiered early Monday morning on WMAR-TV (Channel 2).An effort by NBC to keep its affiliates on the network farm and away from the Cable News Network, the 4 1/2 -hour, seven-day-a-week program is a bare-bones imitation of CNN's Headline News Service. It consists of anchorwomen Sara James and Sandy Gilmour alternating in half-hour shifts at an empty newsroom in Charlotte, N.C. -- a far less expensive city from which to operate than New York or Washington.