The averages from last week:

Total Viewers: NBC: 5.89M / ABC: 4.45M / CBS: 2.80M

A25-54 rating: NBC: 2.0 / ABC: 1.4 / CBS: 0.9

Hannity's interview with Palin Wednesday night, a cable news first as she makes the rounds promoting Going Rogue, drew 4.20M Total Viewers and 1.15M in the A25-54 demo.

Last night, Bill O'Reilly's interview with Palin drew 4.12M Total Viewers and 1.07M in the demo. But O'Reilly has two more nights of Palin -- tonight and Monday.

Fox Business will cover the Senate vote on healthcare reform tomorrow night. Coverage begins at 8pmET with David Asman anchoring from New York and Peter Barnes reporting live from Capitol Hill.

> Update : MSNBC will break in to documentary programming for the vote with David Shuster anchoring (after watching the Michigan/Ohio State game apparently).

After the show, Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski spoke with TVNewser (via flipcam) from New Orleans about their project as well as media coverage of Katrina and its victims.

It's to support the Elder High School Panthers, his alma mater whose football team currently has a 9-2 record for the season with one more game to go against those Anderson H.S. Redskins tomorrow night.

"I had and have a great relationship with Lou and wish him the best. I have to be me here. Lou passionately believed in advocacy journalism. I passionately believe in steering conversations, not shaping them. That makes us different -- doesn't make one right and one wrong."

But most importantly, will we see the Magic Wall in King's new show? "Of course you will," King told Mediaite. "One of the things we think is very important is to use technology in ways to make information more accessible, understandable and interactive with our audience."

(Special thanks to @jonmediaweb for the headline inspiration)

Palin called Charlie Gibson's "Bush Doctrine" question on ABC one of the "gotcha techniques" of the mainstream (or "lamestream") media and she said of the Katie Couric interview on CBS, "It was quite obvious that it was going to be an annoying interview," and that her response was the result of "my inexperience with having to deal with a badgering, condescending line of questioning."

As The Swamp points out, Sean Hannity's Palin interview on Wednesday night drew big numbers for his FNC program, its second largest audience of the year.

TVNewser will have the ratings for O'Reilly's Thursday night program later today.

When the subject of George Stephanopoulos vs. Chris Cuomo came up, the staffers wondered if George could or would even want to pull that interview off. "It's great morning TV to have that exclusive and Cuomo pulled it off without making it feel awkward," one staffer said. "I don't know if George can do those types of interviews and This Week?"

Another expressed concern that those interviews wouldn't even happen with Stephanopoulos there. "The interviews that Cuomo is good at, George couldn't and probably wouldn't want to do. You need those for ratings and if George doesn't want to do them or can't pull them off with some sensitivity, we lose ratings," said the staffer.

A GMA insider responds to TVNewser, "This sounds like someone trying to create an issue where there is none. Both George and Chris are skilled interviewers and terrific broadcasters."

Oprah then teared up as she talked about the show's roots. "These years with you, our viewers, have enriched my life beyond all measure," said a choked-up Oprah. "So why walk away and make next season the last? Here is the real reason. I love this show. This show has been my life. And I love it enough to know when it's time to say goodbye."

The news of Oprah's departure was first reported late yesterday on the Websites of the TV stations on which her show airs.

As for the impact on those stations, primarily ABC affiliates, but NBC and CBS too, the NYTimes spoke with Larry Gerbrandt, an analyst for the firm Media Valuation Partners, who says "any show that ABC comes up with to replace her will not draw anything near the ratings guarantee they could count on with Oprah. At least for the first year, ABC is going to take a serious hit."

And not just ABC affiliates but the network too. Oprah feeds in to the afternoon newscasts and those afternoon newscasts feed in to "World News with Diane Sawyer."

This morning, Sawyer now in her final weeks anchoring "Good Morning America," called Oprah's departure "the end of an era."

So now the two-year swan song begins. What will Oprah's departure really mean to the stations? Who gets the Oprah exit interview? Diane? Barbara? Katie? And who will be the next Oprah? That question we're putting to you:

(Special thanks to TVNewser Chicago contributor Alissa Krinsky, and TiVo, for the Oprah quotes)

This is the first time the award has been given since Cronkite's passing. "The honor you give me here today is the highest of my career," Williams said. "I get to have my name mentioned alongside the best there ever was -- the man I wanted to be."

"I am convinced that had he come along today, I don't think he would have cracked through. I think there's too much noise, too much to cut through for a modest man from Missouri," he told the crowd of nearly 1,200. "But God and history combined to give him to us right when we needed him."

During the ceremony, both Bruce Springsteen and Jon Stewart provided congratulatory videos.

Williams has had some positive things to say about Stewart in return this week. In an article for Newsweek's "New Thought Leaders" -- Stewart was number two -- Williams wrote that Stewart "has gone from optional to indispensable." "There's been another step added to the end of the process," he wrote of the news arc, "Being held to account for our faults by a comedy show with a sharp eye and a sharp tongue. How did we live without it?"

"100 Heartbeats" is the first in MSNBC's "Future Earth" series and it examines endangered species and explains how humans impact their survival.

"MSNBC's never done anything really quite like this," MSNBC President Phil Griffin told the audience prior to a screening of the documentary earlier this week. "But it's a big thing. It's about something that's going on now, and that's where we want to be."

Corwin pitched the doc directly to the network. To understand how the host from Animal Planet ended up pitching the documentary to MSNBC, you have to go back to his last cable news project.

"What made me say MSNBC? Cuz...it wasn't CNN...?" Corwin joked.

"I came up with an idea called 'Planet in Peril' and pitched it to CNN," Corwin told TVNewser, "And I very quickly realized they had their own machine for doing things."

Corwin said "Planet in Peril," the 2007 series on CNN hosted by Anderson Cooper, "kind of got buffered, softened" from the story he wanted to tell. "That's a place that I left with very mixed feelings," he said. "I wanted to be able to have some control over the project and be a true partner in the project. I'm very proud of what 'Planet in Peril' was for CNN, but I never felt like a true partner in it."

The Oprah Winfrey Show airs on WABC-TV in the afternoons but originates from Chicago on ABC station WLS where it airs at 9amCT.

Winfrey saw her best ratings in two years on Monday with an interview with Sarah Palin.