Ross’s replacement, Sherwood, had left his full-time job at NBC several years earlier to write novels (his romantic second book, The Death and Life of Charlie St. Cloud, was a best seller). Arriving at GMA, he quickly set out to create a more congenial environment, encouraging the entire staff to pitch ideas, and speeding up the pace of the broadcast, shortening segments to cram in more stories per half hour than Today. He has done so, in part, by using Today’s superiority in the booking wars to GMA’s advantage. “Because Today has historically been the ratings leader, they often get first crack at the guests,” Sherwood says. “We don’t have the luxury of doing live interviews as often as they do.” As a result, GMA often pre-tapes interviews, then edits the segments; on a recent morning, Gibson taped an interview with the parents of children who had been roughed up by a school-bus driver—Couric went live with them later. “They’re getting a more lively pace by cutting out the deadwood in an interview,” says Tyndall. “It’s more about getting sound bites than the interaction between the interviewer and interviewee.”

In another populist tactic, Good Morning America has begun offering a what-it-means-to-you spin to virtually every story. “No matter what story we cover, from serious news to soft news, we have to find the relatable characteristics,” says Tom Cibrowski, a senior ABC producer in charge of programming for the show’s first hour. “It’s about real people, emotions, getting beyond the dryness of stories.” A recent news story on the travails of embattled U.N. ambassador-designate John Bolton, described at a Senate hearing as a “kiss-up, kick-down” government executive, was quickly followed by a segment on “toxic bosses.”

In the end, GMA didn’t creep up on Today with any one dramatic move. They narrowed the divide with a smart, slow march of small innovations. And like a good political team, they sat back, and let the other guy screw up.

For a woman once hailed as America’s Sweetheart, Katie Couric now has enemies (albeit off-the-record enemies) everywhere. How did it come to this? There’s surely a sexist edge to some of the abuse being heaped on an ambitious woman who’s not shy about pushing hard to get her way. Yet the current snarkiness about Couric also involves a genuine sense of betrayal: People who used to like and admire the anchorwoman now see her as an out-of-control star. As someone high up the food chain at NBC puts it, “They’re worried about Katie and the perception she’s become a diva. The concerns are that she runs the place on whimsy and on her very strong need to be at the center of everything.”

Ever since Today’s executive producer, Jeff Zucker, her trusted ally, was promoted in December 2000 to become president of the Entertainment division, the backstage action at Rockefeller Center has resembled the skating rink on a busy winter day—a lot of gawky maneuvering and a few outright collisions. Without Zucker around, Today hasn’t had a leader powerful enough to either make Couric happy or rein her in. Zucker’s successor, Jonathan Wald, had come from NBC’s Nightly News; by all accounts, he and Couric never hit it off, and after two and a half years he was sent packing to NBC’s version of Siberia, CNBC. Next up was Tom Touchet, recruited from ABC, with experience at Good Morning America; he too lasted about two and a half years before being axed in April.

Couric has publicly protested that she had almost nothing to do with the latest decision. (“I wish I were that powerful and calling the shots,” she told USA Today. “It’s just not the case, but for whatever reason people ascribe to me power that I don’t really have and don’t exert.”) But she left fingerprints. On the Tuesday that Touchet was fired by Neal Shapiro, the producer went back to his office after getting the news and then received a call from Couric. She was on the line to suggest a story for the next day relating to coverage of the new pope. When Touchet explained that he had been let go and wouldn’t be producing the show, Couric blurted out, “That wasn’t supposed to happen until Friday.” (Touchet, who didn’t return calls, repeated her comment immediately to other staffers standing around his office at the time and subsequently told his friends that Couric didn’t even try to fake the usual so-sorry-wish-you-well niceties; instead she abruptly ended the call.) When Lauer organized a good-bye dinner for Touchet and senior staffers, no one was surprised that Couric was not there.

Then the grenade landed. On April 25, New York Times TV critic Alessandra Stanley used the firing of Touchet as an excuse to write a brutal story about Couric, with such lines as “At the first sound of her peremptory voice and clickety stiletto heels, people dart behind doors and douse the lights.” The story further remarked on the “Marxist-style cult of personality” the network has created around the anchorwoman, noting, “The camera fixes on Ms. Couric’s legs during interviews.” Couric was “very upset about the Alessandra Stanley piece,” says an NBC source. The same source says there has been a certain amount of Schadenfreude at NBC’s headquarters. “Some people thought it was a good thing, because she had to confront it.”