Katie Couric

IF ARTHUR Kent, NBS' high-profile war correspondent, got pregnant, would he be bumped off the network?Probably not. The network would find a way to accommodate him. If he wanted maternity leave for four years, I suspect he'd get it.NBS would be good to him either way.I know I'm perpetuating a feminist fantasy here, but VIP news jobs are still pretty male-oriented, as are presidents of big corporations and prestigious spots in our federal government.The...

As the rituals of national mourning began yesterday at Virginia Tech with a convocation featuring President Bush, network television arrived in full at the Blacksburg campus. The ABC, NBC and CBS networks, which played catch-up to the cable channels yesterday, interrupted their regular programming to offer live coverage of the afternoon memorial service and special prime-time news programs. And they did what TV does best: Offer powerful visual images to millions of viewers. But the scattershot barrage of information, cell phone images and witness accounts from local citizen reporters, bloggers and online social networks that fed the 24-hour cable channels of CNN, Fox and MSNBC continued.

NBC did not interrupt its broadcast Thursday of the Macy's Thanksgiving Day parade to bring viewers the news that an M&M balloon had crashed into a light pole, injuring two sisters. In fact, when the time came in the tightly scripted three-hour program for the balloon's appearance, NBC weaved in tape of the balloon crossing the finish line at last year's parade - even as the damaged balloon was being dragged from the accident scene. At 11:47 a.m., as an 11-year-old girl and her 26-year-old sister were being treated for injuries, the parade's announcers - Katie Couric, Matt Lauer and Al Roker - kept up their light-hearted repartee from Herald Square, where the parade ends.

Shark Tale is Finding Nemo with bigger-name stars, far less heart and, the guess here is, about one-third the staying power. The movie starts off with the alternating tales of Oscar (voice of Will Smith), a cleaner wrasse (a small fish that keeps coral reefs tidy by eating leftover food off bigger fish) who desperately wants to live the high life, and Lenny (Jack Black), a vegetarian shark who has the misfortune of being the son of a shark-Mafia don. Oscar is one of those fish - you know the kind - always shooting off their big mouths, but never making anything of themselves.

Katie Couric won't be altering her look. She won't be going off to war merely to read the news while "standing somewhere in a flak jacket." And most of all, she isn't expecting any big "surge" in ratings for CBS Evening News With Katie Couric this fall. As the network's promotional blitz for its new $60 million anchorwoman kicks into high gear, Couric, who will debut in her new role Sept. 5, yesterday launched a counter-campaign of sorts, ratcheting down expectations and softening the drumbeat of hype.

As expected, NBC moved swiftly yesterday to fill the void left by Katie Couric's defection to CBS with Meredith Vieira as co-host of Today. Vieira, who will join Matt Lauer at the anchor desk in September, held back tears yesterday as she announced her decision to join TV's top-rated morning show on ABC's The View, where she has served as one of five co-anchors since its debut in 1997. "I know that part of their reasoning [at NBC] for offering me this job is that I have 20 years of news [experience]

No single move in television news has set off as great a chain reaction as Katie Couric's decision to leave NBC's Today show to become the anchor and managing editor of the CBS Evening News. The star journalist's departure from NBC, which was widely reported early this week, was confirmed on air yesterday during NBC's morning program by the 49-year-old herself. "After listening to my heart and my gut -- two things that have served me pretty well in the past -- I've decided I'll be leaving Today at the end of May," she told her 6 million viewers shortly after 7:30 a.m. With her comments, a sweeping realignment of TV news anchors and hosts that will span shows from NBC's Today and CBS' 60 Minutes, to ABC's The View and World News Tonight began.

Next week, Katie Couric will celebrate her second anniversary as anchor of the CBS Evening News. Given the nature of that tenure, however, "celebrate" might not be quite the right word. "Can't win for losing," is the phrase Couric used to describe parts of the past two years in an interview last week. "It's been, quite candidly, pretty tough some of the time for me in my new job," she says. After a cosmic build-up in the summer of 2006 and a huge, first-night tune-in of about 13 million viewers to see the popular star of NBC's Today show assume the chair once held by Walter Cronkite, the wheels quickly started to come off Couric's new show.

Just about midway through the past century, the guys who ran CBS decided to change the anchorman of the Evening News. Then as now, anchormen changes didn't happen with the flip of a coin, so there was a long debate about what to do. The bosses went through a long list of guys, but the news president at the time liked urbane Charles Collingwood, one of Edward R. Murrow's boys. The entertainment boss liked this slick, handsome, smart guy by the name of Mike Wallace or, if he wasn't available, a guy named Clete Roberts who was anchoring the local news in Los Angeles.

Even at age 6, Kacie Remeto was turning heads on the track.As her father, Stuart, would run laps at Fallston High School trying to stay in shape, he would notice his daughter, who often tagged along, trailing behind him."At first, she was just running to fool around, but, after awhile, she was trying to stay with me," recalled Stuart Remeto, a physical education teacher in Baltimore County and former shortstop at Oregon and Towson State. "I noticed she had really good stamina."Nearly a decade later, Kacie Remeto, 15, is still running.