Abc News

ABC News is being accused of checkbook journalism after landing the first sit-down interview with Joe Jackson following the recent death of his pop superstar son, Michael. Segments of a 45-minute interview with the Jackson family patriarch have already aired on ABC's "Nightline" and "Good Morning America," but the bulk of the interview will air tonight on the network as part of its summer series "Primetime Family Secrets." Mediabistro.

ABC News correspondent Elizabeth Vargas concedes that her network is stepping into a theological minefield with its one-hour exploration of whether Jesus Christ had a wife. The ABC News special, "Jesus, Mary and Da Vinci," is scheduled to air Monday at 8 p.m. "You can't talk about this subject without intriguing people or offending people," Vargas said Thursday. "We're trying to do it as respectfully as we can." ABC screened the special for some reporters and religious leaders on Thursday.

This should be a new dawn for "Nightline." Instead, it could be good night. After years of lagging behind dueling late-night talk shows, the ABC news program is winning attention with a series of high-profile scoops and closing the viewer gap against "Late Show With David Letterman." But instead of celebrating, "Nightline" staffers are anxious. Six years ago, Walt Disney Co. tried to lure Letterman to its ABC network, a move that backfired and frayed relations with the news division.

If you practice journalism long enough, you begin to develop a mental list of characters you hope never again to type in a particular sequence. Take, for example, the letters that spell "O.J. Simpson." Like most sensible people, you've probably been doing something useful with your time recently -- figuring out, say, what "field dressing a moose" actually entails, watching your 401(k) implode or setting up a rescue program for rabid skunks.

President Bush, who has long brushed aside questions about his legacy, is opening up a bit during his final weeks in office. At the White House on Monday, Bush called his HIV/AIDS program "one of the most important initiatives of my administration" and praised it as a resounding success.

ABC's Bob Woodruff is returning to the air next month for the first time since he was seriously wounded in Iraq by a roadside bomb. He will tell the story of his recovery. In "To Iraq and Back: Bob Woodruff Reports," the former "World News" anchor goes back to the soldiers and doctors who helped save his life to share how he overcame the injuries he sustained last January. The special will air at 10 p.m. on Feb. 27. Matea Gold

At ABC News, the talk lately has centered on one question: What's Diane going to do? After a year in which the television news industry absorbed Katie Couric's move to "CBS Evening News" and Meredith Vieira's jump to NBC's "Today" show, Diane Sawyer is poised to trigger more upheaval as she mulls whether to continue her eight-year run on "Good Morning America."

For the last decade, NBC News has dominated broadcast news, besting the competition with juggernaut programs like "Today" and "NBC Nightly News." Even when the network's prime-time fortunes sank in recent years, the news programs remained outposts of ratings strength. But now there are signs that the long-golden news division is losing some of its luster.

WHEN ABC News tapped Amanda Congdon in December to do video blogs for its website and digital channel, the network was hoping to capitalize on the former Rocketboom anchor's popularity among a younger, Web-savvier set. But the alliance between the network news division and the irreverent Web personality has forced ABC to confront a murky issue: When bloggers become journalists, do they have to hew to the same rules?

A few months after rival NBC did it once, ABC News says it will air four editions of "World News" with a single sponsor next month, freeing up five extra minutes for news on each broadcast. ABC has sent reporter Bill Weir traveling for a special series on those days. He'll go to Kiribati, a Pacific island nation that is seeing the effects of global warming, and to Zambia, to report on efforts to reduce infant and maternal mortality. NBC's "Nightly News" aired a broadcast on Dec.