TV Bulletin Board (Sept. 9)
09/09/08 14:07
By ED BARK
President Bush will know who his successor is when he and Laura preside over their last Kennedy Center Honors ceremony on Dec. 7th.
It should be a very fun night regardless, with an impressive batch of new honorees announced Tuesday.
They are Barbra Streisand, Roger Daltrey and Pete Townsend of The Who, George Jones, Morgan Freeman and Twyla Tharp.
CBS, which will television the inductions later in December, has brought this classy show to home screens every year since the Honors were established in 1978. And who got feted back then? Fred Astaire, Richard Rodgers, Arthur Rubinstein, George Balanchine and Marian Anderson.
For a complete list of honorees, go here.
***ABC anchor Charles Gibson has won the inaugural Sarah Palin sweepstakes and will be interviewing the Republican VP nominee on Thursday and Friday in Fairbanks and then Wasilla, Alaska.
ABC says the first excerpts will air on Thursday's World News and also be platformed on the network's Nightline, Good Morning America and 20/20.
***NBC/MSNBC newsman David Gregory seemingly has the pole position to become the next moderator of Meet the Press after Tom Brokaw completes his interim duties sometime after the presidential election.
Hoping to rid itself of a messy situation, MSNBC has named Gregory to anchor coverage of the presidential debates and election night. Gone is the two-headed monster of Keith Olbermann and Chris Matthews, whose pointed opinions and occasional feuding finally were deemed unseemly after they helmed coverage of the Democratic and Republican conventions.
Matthews and Olbermann will remain as analysts and hosts of their respective weeknightly programs, Hardball and Countdown. Their semi-demotions were first reported Monday by The New York Times in a story headlined, "MSNBC Takes Incendiary Hosts From Anchor Seat."