ABC might move Jimmy Kimmel Live to compete with Conan O'Brien's Tonight Show, the New York Times is reporting. ABC is pissed about the story. But it gives Kimmel reason to smile.

Gawker reports—and the Daily News confirms—that Ashley Dupre has taped her first TV interview since she got mixed up in a very minor scandal involving a politician that you may or may not have heard about back in March. Diane Sawyer sat down with the $5,000-an-hour woman yesterday for ABC News; the interview is expected to air next Friday as part of a two-part 20/20 special. It's quite likely Dupre collected substantially more than her standard rate for the Sawyer sit-down. Although ABC News cannot officially pay her for an interview per network policy, rumor has it she was compensated with a "consulting fee" and for "archival footage," which should keep her attired in $632 Fendi belts for many months to come.

Network news divisions got skittish about calling presidential elections following their colossally terrible performance in 2000. In case you forgot, they all called Florida for Al Gore, then uncalled it, then called it for Bush (following in the trustworthy footsteps of Fox News!), then uncalled the whole election. Their newfound prudence was rewarded in 2004 when leaked exit polls said John Kerry had the whole thing in the bag (oops). But this year the TV guys have their swagger back. Here's a CBS News executive telling the Times why California can suck it:

What's one more bit of bad media news on this dark, gloomy Friday? ABC News sent out a memo today saying that the bad economy is causing them to cut back on expense accounts, travel, and conference attendance, cancel all of their holiday parties, and, ironically, cancel all of their subscriptions to print magazines and newspapers (which will help the environment, they note!). And most painfully for ABC execs:

Apologies are in order to Charles Gibson, widely presumed to be too soft to credibly interview Sarah Palin. If anything, the ABC News anchor's first exchange with Palin, aired last night, is all the more embarrassing to Palin precisely because Gibson was hand-picked by her handlers. The Republican vice presidential nominee's awful performance is apparent enough from the transcript, which contains her horribly stilted answer to a question about Iran, invoking "nucular weapons... given to those hands of Ahmadinejad" and already compared to Miss South Carolina's famous thoughts on "the Iraq" at a teen beauty pageant. But things are even worse on video, as seen after the jump.

After his comparatively disastrous speech at the Republican National Convention, it wouldn't seem John McCain could teach Sarah Palin much about public relations. But the Republican presidential nominee appears to have imparted an important lesson in one-on-one media manipulation: Sometimes the best response to a skeptical reporter is to draw him in as closely as possible. Politico said Palin will meet with ABC News' Charlie Gibson not only on Sunday, as originally reported, but in multiple interviews Thursday and Friday, as well, including at the prospective vice president's home in Wasilla, Alaska. Much as McCain used to score points with campaign reporters with seemingly chummy off-the-record chats, Palin no doubt hopes to soften Gibson up with a tour of her home state. Gibson, meanwhile, is supposedly racing to become the sort of interviewer who needs softening up:

"ABC News' Charles Gibson has snagged the sought-after first interview with Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin since she was named the Republican vice presidential pick nearly two weeks ago." [THR]

Well, the press can stop wondering when and where Sarah Palin's first post-nomination television interview will take place. A campaign adviser says they offered ABC nightly news anchor Charles Gibson the job days ago. That's the same Charles Gibson who was last seen being "greasily avuncular and patronizing" when he and his ABC cohort George Stephanopoulos were ruining the Democratic primary debate back in April. You know, the ABC-sponsored event about which a New Yorker scribe wrote, "Seldom has a large corporation so heedlessly inflicted so much civic damage in such a short space of time... If Gibson and his partner, George Stephanopoulos, had halted their descent at the level of the fatuous, that would have been bad enough. But there was worse to come."

Here is an excerpt of John Edwards on Nightline, where the Democratic politician spent most of the time trying to explain the limited nature of his bad behavior. His affair was a brief fling he quickly told his family about, driven by "a narcissism that leads you to believe you can do whatever you want, you're invincible, and there will be no consequences." He didn't have a love child with his mistress, Rielle Hunter, and didn't know anything about any hush money she may have received. He'll take a paternity test and release the results to the news media, if someone can get Hunter to participate. And, Edwards said, he only visited Hunter again recently in a Los Angeles hotel at the insistence of a mutual friend, who promised to be present, to hear a story of Hunter's "struggles." Edwards gave the careful, plausible admission of a skilled lawyer. Whether he is believed will hinge on how people react to his most vulnerable moments. Click the video icon to watch two of them. [ABC News]

Moderators: Lehrer and Gwen Ifill of PBS, Tom Brokaw of NBC, Bob Schieffer of CBS. [WSJ]

Oh, this is exciting: Remember how Roone Arledge of ABC revolutionized TV sports by superimposing dramatic personal narratives onto matches, then revolutionized TV news with magazine shows like 20/20 and Nightline? Well, now ABC News is expanding on this pioneering legacy by venturing where no other news division has dared to go before (on purpose): fiction! Or, as ABC calls it, "reporting from the future." The network is asking everyone to imagine the hellscape of 2100 in order to "form a powerful... narrative about the perils of our future", and thus incite change. To do this, you just need to make a short video about how terrible things are going to be, based on a "briefing" from ABC's team of trained psychics. Here's the email pitch sent to some Columbia students yesterday:

ABC News producer Michael Bicks had a feeling something was wrong after dropping out of a long group bike ride a few weekends ago. "Besides the nausea, my only symptoms were a persistent cough and an overwhelming feeling that something was not right... That’s when Tim Russert popped into my head." Bicks looked up the symptoms of cardiac arrest online and, ignoring his instinct that "it really didn't feel like much," drove himself to the hospital, where he learned he was, indeed, having a severe heart attack. He lived to write about it in this morning's Times, where Bicks said there has been a spike in men hauling themselves into hospitals with symptoms like his, and with similar thoughts of Russert:

ABC News's thesis that "Everyone Is 'Tweeting'" is quickly disproven — in the latest article on Twitter from ABC News. It begins with the obligatory anecdote about James Buck, the Berkeley student briefly jailed in Egypt:

The ABC anchor was supposed to protect a hooker's anonymity, but the interview left too many clues.

Nancy Franklin: "Charles Gibson, ABC's nightly-news anchor, moderated, and was greasily avuncular and patronizing; if ever Gibson was in danger of raising the questioning to a level that might actually yield something useful for viewers, George Stephanopoulos, ABC's Sunday-morning political quarterback, was by his side to make sure that didn't happen." Hendrik Hertzberg: "Seldom has a large corporation so heedlessly inflicted so much civic damage in such a short space of time... If Gibson and his partner, George Stephanopoulos, had halted their descent at the level of the fatuous, that would have been bad enough. But there was worse to come."

When the blogger and prostitute Debauchette was interviewed by Diane Sawyer for an ABC News report, several tricks were used to conceal her identity. She appeared mainly in silhouette, with a distorted profile and a distorted voice. She was identified only as a "beautiful," "highly educated" woman with a day job in the arts. The tricks were not enough, however, to keep Debauchette's parents from figuring out it was their daughter on the screen when they tuned in, as fate would have it, to watch the show. Mom saw Sawyer's report twice, to make sure her instincts had been correct, then fired off an email to her daughter, quoted in a Debauchette blog post:

"ABC is the only major broadcast network that is using the staff of its evening newscast to produce a separate and distinct daily program for a Web audience," a New York Times feature reports today. Among the differences from the broadcast show: More casual correspondents, plus longer back-and-forths between anchor and reporter that would be cut to seven seconds on cable. But ABC's online clips are shackled by two Web video blunders.

"Whatever happened to Amanda Congdon's HBO deal?" asks Broadcasting and Cable today. Last November, the videoblogging web star, whose contract with ABC News was not renewed, said that her HBO project was "going to be comedy, and I know it's going to be cross-platform." But it's almost a year later, and B&C suggests that the deal will shortly expire. Well that's good—Amanda might have overextended her mindshare with so much cross-platforming vertical integration and new media brand synergy interaction! Also: Paradigm shift!

Today, Slate's Jack Shafer admits that he loves Secretary of Defense Robert Gates—almost as much as Gates hearts the press! Looks to us like it was a smooth move this summer when Gates hired ABC News correspondent Geoff Morrell as the press secretary at the Pentagon. Please send all pix of the inevitable toilet-papering of Morrell's house by his former colleagues in the Washington press corps right to us.

Earlier this week, in her first piece since starting at the Observer, Doree Shafrir wrote of the David Burke & Donatella peanut butter & foie gras sandwich. Coincidentally, ABC News took a look at the sandwich today! Let's compare!