Sawyer with fans at the May 24 Good Morning America.    (Photo: Mark Peterson/Redux)

“That’s ‘Page Six,’ ” says Phil Griffin, the newly named executive in charge of the Today show. “Who cares about it? Katie’s been in this for a long time.”

The network declined to make Couric or Lauer available for this story, offering Griffin alone, and only for a phone interview. Allison Gollust, NBC’s senior vice-president of news media, was so eager to make this story go away that when I first called to request interviews, she not only declined but told me that I’d be reduced to talking to “disgruntled ex-employees.”

Of the many people I spoke to who criticized Couric, some were unhappy employees, to be sure, and all refused to be identified, but her detractors ran up through the ranks at NBC. “She’s surrounded herself with suck-ups,” says one. “It’s never her fault.” Says another, “She can be phenomenally wonderful and generous, and when you’re in her presence you feel great. But there’s a flip side, and it isn’t pretty.”

d?*¸? to the Q-ratings research on viewer likes and dislikes, Couric’s negatives were already rising by last summer, and a TV executive, who doesn’t have a vested interest in this fight, says the unflattering publicity can only make matters worse. “When there is any kind of soap-opera aspect to the show, it gets magnified; that does change public perception,” he says.

It hasn’t hurt Good Morning America that ABC has been blessed by the prime-time gods with two huge hits this season, Desperate Housewives and Lost, bona fide cultural phenomena that are cross-promoted endlessly on GMA, while NBC has lost Friends, Frasier, and Seinfeld in recent years. But as Westin says, “CBS is No. 1 in prime time, and where are they in the morning?” (The answer: CBS’s The Early Show remains a perennial third.) “Does being able to have someone from Desperate Housewives on our program on Monday help us? You bet,” says Westin. “But we’re producing a better program and taking advantage of everything we can get our hands on.” (For the record, CBS News president Andrew Heyward notes that his show is also benefiting from Today’s problems. “With the Today show losing viewers, GMA has done a good job closing the gap, but some of those people are coming to us too,” he says.)

Phil Griffin insists the show suffers from nothing more than its own success. “We’ve got a race on our hands,” he says. “We’ve had a ten-year streak. It’s hard to keep that up—you’ve got to reinvent yourself. People feel good,” he says. “We’re not going to give in.”

Griffin’s rah-rah rhetoric notwithstanding, morale has taken a huge hit at NBC’s Rockefeller Center studios. “We used to tell people, your family should watch our family,” says one NBC source, “but we’ve become the Manson family.”

NBC executives are scrambling to salvage the show with a firing- and-hiring binge: Today executive producer Tom Touchet—the show’s third producer in five years—was just shown the door and replaced by the tag team of Griffin, a former MSNBC executive, and former sports producer Jim Bell; a host of lower-level jobs are also in turnaround. Last Friday, NBC News president Neal Shapiro was said to be in talks to leave his post, partially owing to the crisis at Today.

Shapiro’s boss, NBC president Jeff Zucker, the former Today producer who has long been one of Couric’s biggest boosters, recently descended to the control room for several visits to smooth things over. He has been reduced to apologizing repeatedly for the show, telling reporters at a breakfast, “We haven’t really innovated at the Today show in the last three or four years. You need a sense of freshness, and I don’t think we’ve given that.” But he stoutly defended his anchors at the press event, saying, “I don’t think there’s an issue with the talent.”

NBC, according to Business Week, earns an estimated $250 million in operating profits from Today. Westin wouldn’t reveal ABC’s figures but says, “Good Morning America is the most profitable program we have. The sensitivity on a tenth of a demographic ratings point is substantial, well over $10 million a year.”

No wonder, then, that both sides treat the ratings war with deadly gravity. In the control room at Good Morning America on the Monday after I witnessed Sawyer’s comedy routine, executive producer Ben Sherwood, who took over the show a year ago and has led GMA in the final sprint to catch Today, glanced repeatedly at the monitors showing all three morning shows and scribbled notes. At 7:13 A.M., Lauer interviewed a dermatologist about the importance of using sunscreen; at the same time, Sawyer was talking to two Florida policemen who found an abducted 8-year-old girl buried under rocks in a Dumpster. For Sherwood, who had previously consulted for Today (Touchet ended the relationship three years ago), this spring’s GMA ratings surge is not only welcome news—it’s vindication. But Sherwood is not about to gloat. He’s taking his notes, he says, as part of the ongoing strategic battle—“so I can study the chessboard afterward.”