Seven months after her father George W. Bush left office, Jenna Bush Hager signed with NBC to be a correspondent on the Today show.

CNN’s Lou Dobbs has estranged himself from his audience in relentlessly beating the birther story.

A food fight that has generated viewers and controversy for Fox News and MSNBC has ended.

Two years ago, Ben Silverman took on the job of restoring NBC’s entertainment lineup to its former glory.

American Idol may be losing an executive producer, but Nigel Lythgoe, the producer behind Idol and So You Think You Can Dance, has a new show in the works.

What do you do when your longtime girlfriend tells you she’s “f***ing Matt Damon?” If you’re Jimmy Kimmel, you f*** Ben Affleck!

Every movie about a strike needs a heroine, someone brash enough to stand on top of a table with a megaphone and demand justice.

But some credit for the possible ending of the three-month-old strike by the Writers Guild of America may be going to a different sort of heroine.

New York Times reporter Michael Cieply writes today that Laeta Kalogridis, most recently the executive producer of Bionic Woman, helped bring the warring parties together not with a megaphone but with a phone and with e-mail.

With the writers strike, many TV addicts are left with only reality television to entertain them. To help fill the void, reality show heavy-hitter, American Idol, returns tonight and tomorrow for its seventh season premiere on Fox.

But American Idol may be one reality competition that isn’t actually about winning or losing. Lately, winners have been losing recording contracts and losers are topping charts, winning Grammys and Oscars, and debuting on Broadway.

Move over Martha Stewart because Rachael Ray’s souffle is rising.

In a year that saw the share price of the once-mighty Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia sag precipitously, Stewart dropped off Fortune’s list of the 50 Most Powerful Women.

Ray, meanwhile, strengthened her claim as America’s new domestic diva in 2007. She signed a new contract with Food Network, and pulled down $16 million for her thriving year-old network television talk show.

If you’re familiar with the phrase, “You know you love me,” you’ve been tuning into one of the latest guilty pleasure TV shows: Gossip Girl.

The new drama is from writer and producer Josh Schwartz, best known for creating the The OC, which went off the air in February 2007.

Awkward. That’s the best way to describe John Bowman’s position in the writers strike that began today. He is chairman of the negotiating committee for the Writers Guild of America, but also executive producer of the new series, “Frank TV,” starring comedian Frank Caliendo.

By striking, Bowman is walking away from his producer job.

This is the first industrywide writers strike since 1988. About 12,000 movie, TV, radio and animation writers are involved.

He claims he IS America in the title of his best-seller, I Am America (And So Can You!). So why is it so surprising that Stephen Colbert has announced he’s running for president?

For starters, Colbert is running only in South Carolina. And he’s a comedian.

There are many ways to meet one’s fate on The Island. ABC’s Losties have perished because of a man-killing smoke monster, gunshot wounds, deadly illnesses and drowning. Add another character-killer to the list: DUI.

In Hawaii, where the series is filmed, several Lost stars have been caught driving under the influence and it seems the punishment for the offense goes beyond the courthouse punishment. All actors who have been arrested in Hawaii during filming have had their characters killed off on the show.

Fans of NBC’s hit comedy series The Office have spent many Thursday nights waiting and hoping for the central star-crossed couple, Jim Halpert and Pam Beesly, to finally start dating.

After sitting through Pam’s engagement to Roy and Jim’s relationship with Karen, Jim and Pam enthusiasts got their wish in the season three finale. Jim turns down a position at Dunder Mifflin’s corporate headquarters in New York, dumps his current paramour, and asks Pam to dinner.

Bad times for newspapers can be good times for newspaper lobbyists.

Major publishers, which often cover K Street as a hotbed of corruption, spend thousands each year to advance and protect their own interests.

Yet one issue that has fueled the Washington media lobby for years may soon disappear. Federal Communications Commission Chairman Kevin J. Martin has drafted a plan that would abolish rules forbidding companies from owning both a newspaper and broadcast outlets in the same city.

TV can be a goofy business, but this couldn’t be the script the boys in Hearst Tower had in mind when they offered $600 million a few weeks ago for the small piece of Hearst-Argyle Television they don’t already own.

A special committee of Hearst-Argyle directors advised against the deal last week, calling it “inadequate” and saying it is “not in the best interests” of stockholders, other than Hearst.

Tom Scott, already half of a business-world power couple, is bringing new focus on the affluent through his broadcast network, Plum TV.

Scott is a co-founder of Nantucket Nectars, the beverage company bought by Cadbury-Schweppes in 2002. His wife, Emily Scott, founded J. Crew.

Fred Thompson’s long-awaited announcement that he is running for president finally came last night, on The Tonight Show.

“You’ve been in the water for a while now,” host Jay Leno observed. “Are you starting to get a bit wrinkly?”

Thompson, 65, said his wrinkles did not come from water. “We’re where we need to be right now, and that’s one of the things I need to talk to you about,” he said. “I’m running for president of the United States.”

Florida investor Bruce Sherman finds himself in the midst of another media company buyout. This time it’s Hearst-Argyle Television, which received an offer from majority shareholder Hearst Corporation.

Hearst, a privately held publisher of newspapers, magazines and Internet properties, already owns more than 73 percent of the broadcaster’s shares. It is offering $600 million for the remainder.

The affair between Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa and a local TV reporter may become an issue in a proposed real estate development in the city.

Telemundo, owner of KVEA-TV, is weighing the fate of journalist Mirthala Salinas, who reported on the mayor while she was romantically involved with him.

At the same time, NBC Universal, owner of Telemundo, has proposed a $3-billion development in Los Angeles that includes 2,900 new homes and 1.6 million square feet of commercial space. The project would require city approval.