elizabeth vargas

ABC announced today that Good Morning America's anchor duo of Charlie Gibson and Diane Sawyer will fill in for Bob Woodruff on World News Tonight. As everyone knows, Woodruff suffered severe injuries in an IED explosion in Iraq. Because his injuries will keep him out of action indefinitely, ABC News president David Westin decided to preserve the dual-anchor format that Woodruff and Elizabeth Vargas started on January 3. To that end, Gibson and Sawyer will take turns co-anchoring WNT with Vargas until Woodrufff is well enough to return.

I would imagine that both Gibson and Sawyer won't venture out into the field much, so look for Vargas to be taking the "intrepid reporter" role so that Westin's vision of having at least one anchor in the field can continue.

The irony, of course, is that Gibson was passed over for Vargas and Woodruff when the permanent pairing was announced in December.

World News Tonight anchorman Bob Woodruff and cameraman Doug Vogt arrived in the United States last night and are being treated at National Naval Medical Center in Bethesda, Maryland. ABC says it considered moving the men to a private hospital but decided against it since the military doctors have experience treating victims of bombings. The picture at the right is of soldiers loading Woodruff on transport that would take him to a C-17 military plane in Germany. You can see from all the medical instruments, his injuries are very serious. Woodruff's family reports that he was hit in the face and brain with shrapnel when the Iraqi military vehicle he and Vogt were riding in hit a roadside bomb just outside Baghdad, Iraq over the weekend. Vogt, on the other hand, is reportedly in much better condition. He was laughing and making jokes while at the hospital in Germany, whereas Woodruff could barely open his eyes.

Co-anchor of World News Tonight Bob Woodruff and cameraman Doug Vogt were injured when the vehicle they were riding in hit a roadside bomb early Sunday morning. The two apparently were standing up in a hatch, filming a story in the vehicle as it drove along.

The two are listed in stable but critical condition, after being flown to the "green zone" where military doctors operated on them. ABC is providing continuous updates on their conditions here.

Concidentally, today's Washington Post features an article about Woodruff and his co-anchor, Elizabeth Vargas. In the article, Woodruff says his goal is "to be the best damn foreign correspondent I could be."

The new, young faces of World News Tonight debut this evening on ABC. Five months after Peter Jennings' death from lung cancer, Elizabeth Vargas and Bob Woodruff will co-host the nightly newscast. They are the first network anchor team since Dan Rather and Connie Chung shared the desk at CBS in the 1990s. But, don't expect to see them sharing the desk very often. Vargas says it's not going to be two anchors sharing 22 minutes of news, rather, one of them will most likely be reporting anchoring from the field while the other reads the rest of the news from the desk. In fact, tonight's debut of the new format has Vargas at the anchor desk and Woodruff off in Iran. I imagine this is what the anchoring-from-the-field schtick is going to be like: Vargas and Woodruff sharing different "in-depth" or "special" reports about issues rather than day-to-day news events. The purpose of Woodruff's visit to Iran tonight is to help bring better understanding to Americans about a very powerful country that has been on the Bush Administration's radar ever since it was included in the "axis of evil".

Vargas and Woodruff take over the #2-rated newscast in the nation, with Brian Williams and NBC still on top. CBS has yet to decide what it will do with its open anchor position and there are still whispers that Katie Couric is in contention.

Elizabeth Vargas, who in our estimation is muy bonita, laid out some details about the new two-anchor format of ABC's World News Tonight, which she and Bob Woodruff will start on January 3. In an article for Daily Variety (you may need to view a short ad to see the whole article), Vargas tells reporter Michael Learmonth that she and Woodruff will rarely be sitting at the same desk, throwing it back and forth to each other like it's a local news broadcast. "I don't anticipate a ping-pong thing back and forth," she tells Learmonth. Multiple standing and sitting positions being built into the new set will ensure this. But most of the time, one anchor will be in the field and one in the studio, each doing large chunks of the show on their own.

Indeed, their tenure will begin with Vargas in the New York studio and Woodruff reporting from Iran. If you've ever seen the nights when Brokaw, Rather, or Jennings was on the road and threw the second half of the broadcast to a studio anchor, you'll get the idea of what ABC is trying to do. This can only help, because the "ping-pong thing," as Vargas put it, doesn't work well on a 22-minute network broadcast. I mean, ABC must have learned something from the Barbara Walters/Harry Reasoner fiasco from thirty years ago. Right?

[via TVNewser]

When I was doing my post about the lovely Bonnie Hunt, I realized that there are more more sexy women over 40 all over the entertainment spectrum than at any time I can remember. I don't know if it's better diets, the advent of Botox, or something else, but 40 no longer seems to be the career killer it once was. Here are the five women on TV who are old enough to remember the Nixon administration but still make even young guys' hearts go pitter-patter.

Some caveats: I am excluding Hunt because she's mainly in movies now. I am also including women who have been on TV recently, but not necessarily this year. Finally, everyone on Desperate Housewives only makes Honorable Mention because I want to give others their due for once.

By the way, this took me a while to do. I just kept remembering people who could fit in this category; some of whom you'll see are quite surprising. I was going to include women who were over 50 and over 60, but I decided to give them lists of their own, you'll see those in the coming days.

Click on the link for the picks.