Television News

NEW YORK (Hollywood Reporter) - Kara DioGuardi wants to hang out with Ellen DeGeneres before the new season of "American Idol" to get the judges working together comfortably.

NEW YORK - Janet Jackson says she recognized her brother Michael's drug problem, and tried to help him, but that he rebuffed those attempts to intervene.

LOS ANGELES (Reuters) - A former prostitute whose memoirs were turned into the TV series "Secret Diary of a Call Girl" has revealed her true identity -- Brooke Magnanti, a British research scientist.

LOS ANGELES - Academy Awards overseers have chosen an entertainment veteran to direct the next Oscar show.

LOS ANGELES (Hollywood Reporter) - Alyssa Milano, star of ABC's midseason comedy "Romantically Challenged," is doing double duty for the network.

NEW YORK - Dr. Walter Bishop follows in a long line of mad scientists. An unbalanced genius like Bishop going at it in his lab is a pop-culture staple. Or even, some would say, a cliche.

NEW YORK - Fox News Channel correspondent Major Garrett called himself a "conscientious objector" in his network's fight with the White House after a brief interview with President Barack Obama Wednesday during which the topic never came up.

LOS ANGELES (Hollywood Reporter) - "Just Shoot Me" veteran George Segal will star in cable channel TV Land's comedy pilot "Retired at 35."

LOS ANGELES - Model Joanna Krupa is leaving "Dancing With the Stars."

NEW YORK (Reuters) - DirecTV Group Inc said on Wednesday it will appoint PepsiCo Inc executive Michael White as its new chief executive starting on January 1.

SACRAMENTO, Calif. - Authorities have arrested a fugitive wanted in three San Francisco Bay area slayings after his case was featured on "America's Most Wanted."

LOS ANGELES - A judge has granted a civil restraining order against a man accused of stalking Ryan Seacrest.

NEW YORK - Somewhere in the universe of TV viewers, there's got to be a person who actually likes those pop-up, on-screen promotions.

NEW YORK - Country music helped ABC to its best ratings week in more than a year.

Prime-time viewership numbers compiled by Nielsen Co. for Nov. 9-15. Listings include the week's ranking, with viewership for the week and season-to-date rankings in parentheses. An "X" in parentheses denotes a one-time-only presentation.

BOSTON - A federal judge in Massachusetts has dismissed a lawsuit accusing television personality Elisabeth Hasselbeck of plagiarism.

NEW YORK - Reality TV personalities Heidi and Spencer Pratt said Monday they want to branch out from MTV's "The Hills" and star in their own reality show to give viewers a bigger peek into their lives.

NEW YORK - CBS News is planning an ambitious turn-of-decade look at America's position in the world that's also designed as an opening competitive shot at Diane Sawyer.

NEW YORK - Lou Dobbs says he doesn't feel like he was pushed out of CNN, the news organization where he worked for all but two years of its existence until last Wednesday.

LONDON - A British scientist says she is Belle de Jour, the anonymous blogger whose accounts of life as a call girl were turned into books and a TV series.

NEW YORK - Eight decades after pioneering the concept of broadcasting, NBC is on the verge of a startling move that illustrates broadcast television's decline.

WASHINGTON - Jon Gosselin has filed a counter lawsuit against the TLC network, claiming television producers violated Pennsylvania's child labor laws in filming the hit reality show "Jon & Kate Plus 8" and are preventing him from working.

WASHINGTON - Jon Gosselin has filed a counter lawsuit against the TLC network, claiming television producers violated Pennsylvania's child labor laws in filming the hit reality show "Jon & Kate Plus 8" and are preventing him from working.

LOS ANGELES - A German man was charged Thursday with trying to extort $100,000 from former supermodel Cindy Crawford and her entrepreneur husband Rande Gerber over a photo of their daughter bound to a chair and gagged, authorities said.

OKLAHOMA CITY - The owner of a Nevada brothel featured on the HBO reality show "Cathouse" said Thursday he fears one of his employees is among the four people whose bodies were found in a burning house in Oklahoma City.

LOS ANGELES - A contestant who was hospitalized after competing briefly on the game show "Wipeout" died two weeks later of a stroke apparently caused by a rare condition, his father said.

LOS ANGELES - Ron Livingston and Rosemarie DeWitt have tied the knot.

NEW YORK - TV network ABC's cancellation of the comedy "Hank" makes it two failures in three years for star Kelsey Grammer.

LOS ANGELES (Hollywood Reporter) - Sci-fi legend Ray Bradbury is preparing to shop a six-hour miniseries to television networks that will feature a half-dozen of his classic short stories, each directed by a different person.