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After weeks of widespread speculation about her future, Katie Couric is finally ready to go on the record. "I have decided to step down from the CBS Evening News," Couric tells PEOPLE exclusively. "I'm really proud of the talented team on the CBS Evening News and the award-winning work we've been able to do in the past five years in addition to the reporting I've done for 60 Minutes and CBS Sunday Morning. In making the decision to move on, I know the Evening News will be in great hands, but I am excited about the future." What's next for...

For Katie Couric, the offer in 2006 to become the anchor of “CBS Evening News” came with another incentive, one she prized almost as highly, according to two of her friends: the chance to report for “60 Minutes,” the newsmagazine that for Ms. Couric stood for the kind of serious journalism she had always aspired to. Regular appearances on “60 Minutes” were written into her $15 million-a-year contract with CBS, but once she arrived at the network, she found a chilly reception from some of the staff members at the venerable program. Some of Ms. Couric’s associates said that the...

As headlines have Meredith Vieira leaving the "Today" show, a source tells ET and The Insider that Matt Lauer has notified his NBC bosses that he will be resigning from the "Today" show when his contract expires on December 31, 2012. Could he be thinking about re-teaming with his former "Today" show co-host Katie Couric and his former "Today" show executive producer Jeff Zucker? It has been widely speculated that Couric is expected to leave the "CBS Evening News" and launch her own talk show with Zucker. The "Today" show released a statement Wednesday, saying, "There seems to be an...

NEW YORK (AP) -- Katie Couric is leaving her anchor post at "CBS Evening News" less than five years after becoming the first woman to solely helm a network TV evening newscast. A network executive, who spoke on condition of anonymity because Couric has not officially announced her plans, reported the move to The Associated Press on Sunday night. The 54-year-old anchor is expected to launch a syndicated talk show in 2012 and several companies are vying for her services. Couric's move from NBC's "Today" show was big news in 2006, and she began in the anchor chair with a...

“Jeffrey is a monster.” That’s how 27 year old Virginia Roberts describes convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein, and she should know. Virginia is now a married mother of three living in Australia but 12 years ago, when she was just 15, she was groomed by Epstein as his personal sexual assistant and traveling companion. Last week Mrs. Roberts, who had been identified in court documents only as “Jane Doe 102,” saw pictures of Epstein walking free with Prince Andrew and got angry. She decided to break her silence and told her story over several days to the Daily Mail. You...

Interesting exchange in an interview with her new Boss. Is Katie Couric out at CBS? No one knows, but the new Chairman of CBS News said he doesn't know yet whether Katie Couric wants to stay at the network. From 'Broadcasting & Cable...' "What are your thoughts on keeping Katie Couric in the family? Do you think she wants to stay?" "I don't know whether she does. It's a good question. It's high on the list of things to do to spend some time with Katie to find out what she wants to do and what she sees is best...

An NBC worker who posted old footage from the "Today" show of the hosts wondering, "What is the Internet anyway?" has been fired, the network confirmed, saying the person had a history of distributing material without permission. The footage, in which Katie Couric, Bryant Gumbel and Elizabeth Vargas try to figure out the Internet and e-mail addresses, made the rounds via said Internet last week, posted and re-posted to Facebook pages and sent via e-mail. Filmed in 1994, the clip features Gumbel demanding, with a befuddled expression: "What is the Internet anyway?" and Couric stumbling to define it as: "that...

Katie Couric:Can You Explain What Internet Is? (Video) Here's a recently re-discovered oldie—and goodie!—to show how far technology has come in the last two decades. Watch this Today Show clip from 1994, featuring Katie Couric and Bryant Gumbel's complete confusion about what, exactly, the Internet is.

Is a cat fight strictly a feminine affair, or can a man and woman engage in one? Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski certainly seemed to offer up a good example of the genre today. The two traded feline fisticuffs on Morning Joe. Scarborough went first, swiping at Katie Couric for having cavorted on a Miami beach with her beau before departing for Egypt. Mika later retaliated, archly musing about the number of Limbaugh's marriages during a segment featuring Elton John's comments on El Rushbo. View video here.

Remember Katie Couric's insipid suggestion that Americans needed a Muslim version of The Cosby Show to help us get over our seething Islamophobia? It earned derision in the blogosphere for its condescending view of the country as a hive of bigotry and its refusal to give the Islamic world any share of the blame for Islamic image problems, but PopEater reports that the idea is picking up steam among Muslims in the television industry: "We want to see a typical Arab-American family that is just like every other family in America," said Arab-American comedian Dean Obeidallah, who has developed a...

Given the chance to interview Katie Couric, I wouldn't ask her what newspapers she reads. I'd want to know how she understands her role as anchor, and why she thinks it's appropriate to express opinions on controversial issues of the day. For that's just what she's done on the subject of gun control, expressing disappointment that Pres. Obama didn't raise it in his SOTU. Describing her dissatisfaction in her "Notebook" yesterday, Couric asserted that PBO's failure to raise gun control put a "cloud" over the SOTU. View video after the jump.

To: CBS Entertainment Division From: Katie Couric Re: Muslim Cosby Show Ideas Hey guys. I’ve been meaning to do this for about a week, but with the assassination in Pakistan and the bombing of the Coptic church in Egypt, things have been busy over here on the news side. I know I’m a little out of my element here, being a serious and super-well respected journalist, but I really was serious the other day when I said on air that we need a “Muslim Cosby Show.” As you guys know, that warm portrayal of a middle class African-American family in...

Please see video at link.

Airhead extraordinaire Katie Couric suggested the idea of a Muslim version of 'The Cosby Show' to bring Islam into the mainstream. If the episodes were to be true to Islam, I wondered, what would the show be like? (Taken from the actual Cosby Show synopsis)

As we put 2010 into the history books, here's a few things to look for over the next 12 months: Katie Couric will say something stupid. Maybe she was still riding high from all the back-slaps she got for her 'interview' with Sarah Palin. Maybe she was reading her own press clippings. Maybe she's just an idiot in way over her head as a news anchor. Whatever the cause, there is no one in the journalistic world who can be relied on to spew eye-rollers more than Couric. She closed out 2010 with her now infamous suggestion that there be...

Katie Couric: 'Maybe We Need a Muslim Version of The Cosby Show' By Tim Graham Created 12/30/2010 - 1:04pm By Tim Graham | December 30, 2010 | 13:04 Tim Graham's picture In her @katiecouric Web show analyzing the trends of 2010, the CBS Evening News anchor made a serious speech (in her serious, deep-thinker glasses) against the deep "seething hatred" against Muslims in America: I also think sort of the chasm, between, or the bigotry expressed against Muslims in this country has been one of the most disturbing stories to surface this year. Of course, a lot of noise was...

As 2010 comes to a close, the media industry is taking its annual breather to reflect upon all the things it had to cover in the past year. Katie Couric, in her CBSNews.com review of 2010, highlighted the controversy surrounding the Park51 project. “The bigotry expressed against Muslims in this country has been one of the most disturbing stories to surface,” she told her panel. In that media narrative, she saw “a seething hatred many people feel for all Muslims,” which she theorized could be remedied by another, more lighthearted narrative: “Maybe we need a Muslim version of The Cosby...

CBS News and “CBS Evening News” anchor Katie Couric have begun preliminary talks about a new contract, Bloomberg News reports. Couric’s current deal with CBS ends next year. Not surprisingly, it appears that any potential deal would result in lower pay for Couric, who signed a record-breaking $15 million a year in 2006. That would be in line with what CBS CEO Les Mooves said in August of rich anchor conracts: ”Those days are over, because the news no longer generates the kind of revenue or success that’s worth doing [those contracts].” Later that month he backtracked a bit, saying...

Larry King's last "Larry King Live" show was a nonstop promenade of high-profile names and faces Thursday, including a current and a former president, a gaggle of news anchors and the like, King's wife and kids, and Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger declaring it "Larry King Day." Tony Bennett serenaded the host with "The Best Is Yet to Come." King himself even thanked "the suits at the top." But the standout, perhaps, was Katie Couric. Who wrote a poem. For Larry. And read it, out loud. All of it. On purpose. The text of the poem -- "filled with love" from Couric...

On December 3, former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice gave CBS's Katie Couric a much-needed lesson on why America invaded Iraq. When Couric said to her guest during an "HBO History Makers Series" interview, "Documentaries have been made about how intelligence was incorrectly analyzed and cherry-picked to build an argument for war, and memos from that time do suggest that officials knew there was a small chance of actually finding weapons of mass destruction in Iraq," Rice stopped the host dead in her tracks (video follows with transcript and commentary):