Morning Show

Two anchors from WBAL-TV are leaving their jobs, part of a series of unrelated shifts at the top-rated Baltimore news station. Morning news anchor Marilyn Getas will be replaced by Mindy Basara, a reporter and weekend morning anchor who has been with WBAL-TV since 1998. Absent the opportunity to move into a more prominent anchor slot here, Getas said she would have preferred to stay in her current job. But she could not come to terms with the station on a new contract. Her final day is June 4, and she is pursuing other television news jobs.

When her children were young, Jenny Lauck flipped on Today or Good Morning America as she brewed her morning coffee and tended her babies. But several years ago, the 34-year-old mother of three stopped watching the morning shows. After getting TiVo, she had no patience to sit through multiple commercial breaks during a live newscast. On top of that, the segments seemed frivolous. "Watching morning television for me is the equivalent of reading People magazine in the dentist's office," said Lauck, who writes for Web sites from her home in Santa Rosa, Calif.

TV news has mostly been defined by downward trends the past decade. Shrinking audience. Aging audience. Fragmented audience. But there's been one very bright spot amid the economic and ratings gloom for stations in Baltimore and across the country — the morning news. Mirroring the success of network shows like "The Today Show," and "Good Morning America," local morning news programs are steadily expanding airtime, staff and revenue. Now, some local morning news shows are bringing in more money than the late newscasts — once the cash cows for stations.

"Kathleen's under spell of fat police; Pounds for bucks, oh Kathleen!" screams a headline in the Hartford Courant."As Kathleen Sullivan Loses, She Wins," trumpets the Washington Post."Dieting with Kathleen Sullivan -- With A Will and A Weigh," chimes in the New York Times.Excuse me while I scream.AAAAAAAGGGGGGGHHHHHH!Or to put it another way: Stop the insanity!Here we are, barely two weeks into 1994 and already it's threatening to become the Year of the Woman Who Let Us Down.That woman is, of course, Kathleen Sullivan, former network news anchor.

Just because Jim West won't be reporting sports on WBAL Radio's morning show every day doesn't mean he's taking a rest.To the contrary, West, who will go on "semi-retirement" after Friday, will be a pretty busy guy, doing occasional fill-ins for newcomer Pam Ward, reporting from the Preakness and Camden Yards and calling lacrosse for Home Team Sports.West, who will be 66 later this month, just won't be getting up at 2:30 a.m. as much, and he considers that a good thing."Gosh, now I'll be able to stay at the games without having to look at the clock and thinking, 'I've got to get to bed and get up in a few hours,' " said West.

Baltimore was just supposed to be a brief stop on the way to big-time TV success.Some brief stop. Two decades later, Marty Bass is still plugging away on WJZ, Channel 13, doing the weather, playing Costello to Don Scott's Abbott, firming up his reputation as one of the most irrepressible (some might prefer incorrigible) talents on Baltimore's airwaves.A native of Kentucky, Bass has spent the past 16 years as co-host of WJZ's morning show, a ratings champion that outdraws the competition by a greater margin than any other local weekday news show.

Words come easily for Dick Cavett, so he had no trouble yesterday capturing the periods of overpowering despair that have kept this funnyman in his bathrobe for weeks while contemplating the relief that might come from suicide.Mr. Cavett, 56, strode into a room full of reporters at Johns Hopkins Hospital, his shirt open at the collar, tie slung over his arm, and quipped, "It's no fun being a specimen."Then, asked to describe clinical depression for those who might not understand, he had this to say: "Everything turns sort of colorless.

"Tell me your diamonds."This is one of many memorable lines in "Beloved," the film adapted from Toni Morrison's book that opens in theaters on Friday. The title character, a strange, otherworldly girl, is asking her mother, played by Oprah Winfrey, to tell the story of a long-lost pair of shiny crystal earrings.But when Winfrey - who has spent 10 years bringing Morrison's Pulitzer Prize-winning novel to the screen - recently met with the press in Chicago, she was not wearing crystal. She was wearing very real, very big diamonds that dangled voluptuously from her ears.

WBFF Fox 45 is planning to launch weekend morning news programs starting Jan. 20, according to Bill Fanshawe, the station's general manager. The news programs will air from 6 a.m.-8 a.m. Saturdays and 7 a.m.-9 a.m. and 10 a.m.-11 a.m. on Sundays. Fox has a newscast from 9 a.m.-10 a.m. "I'm just working around the network schedule," Fanshawe said in an email, explaining the break in the local broadcast during the 9 o'clock hour. As for anchors, "We haven't named any talent yet," Fanshawe said.

Oprah Winfrey is one great storyteller. So let her set the stage for the story of her years in Baltimore - seven and a half years starting in 1976 that would profoundly shape not only the life of the young anchorwoman, but also give birth to the media phenomenon known as Oprah. "I came to Baltimore when I was 22 years old. Drove my red Cutlass up from Nashville, Tenn., arrived and was as close to 'The Beverly Hillbillies' as I could be," Winfrey says in that rich, inviting voice that millions have tuned in to for decades.