Generalities

A week of Sarah Palin interviews began Monday on Oprah and culminated last night on "20/20," and in between national TV interviews with Sean Hannity and Bill O'Reilly with each drawing huge ratings.

• Oprah Winfrey had her highest-rated show in two years with the Palin interview Monday.

• Wednesday's "Hannity", featuring Palin, was the second most-watched show of the year for the Fox News host with 4.2M Total Viewers.

• Thursday's O'Reilly interview with Palin drew 4.12M Total Viewers.

• And last night Barbara Walters' interview with former VP nominee won the 10 o'clock hour in Total Viewers, A18-49 and A25-54. It was the second-biggest audience for "20/20" in the last eight months.

And the interviews will continue next week. Palin will be a guest on "On the Record with Greta Van Susteren" on Monday. Also, Part III of O'Reilly's interview is set for Monday.

Bill Moyers has said PBS' weekly "Bill Moyers Journal" will end on April 30, 2010, reports the NY Times:

"I am 75 years old," he said of the decision to end the series, which began in April 2007. The program has recently been having a "good run of it," he added in a telephone interview on Friday, "so I feel it's time." He said he was not quitting television work, although he has no new projects planned.

PBS says it will announce its new lineup plans in January.

At the end of her show this morning, Oprah Winfrey made it official telling her audience, "After much prayer and months of careful thought I have decided that next season - season 25 - will be the last season of 'The Oprah Winfrey Show.' And over the next couple of days you may hear a lot of speculation in the press about why I am making this decision now, and that will mostly be conjecture."

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)

Breaking: WABC.com reports Oprah Winfrey will end her talk show. The announcement will come on her show tomorrow with the final airing expected to be Sept. 9, 2011.

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.

TVNewser was up at the space-station that is the Bloomberg building yesterday for the "Covering the Crisis" panel moderated by author and journalist Michael Lewis. The event was co-hosted by Bloomberg and Vanity Fair, and both Bloomberg media CEO Andy Lack and VF editor Graydon Carter addressed the crowd beforehand.

The panel brought together several noteworthy financial journalists to discuss their perspectives of the events of the last year.

Bloomberg TV's Margaret Brennan facilitated the audience Q&A, but first had an interesting question of her own: what role did financial cable news play in all this?

NYT's Andrew Ross Sorkin said he watched "countless hours of television to see what people were talking about at the time," while doing research for his book "Too Big to Fail." He said he believes cable news did have a big impact: "It was the TV and the actual personalization of it -- the actual watching another human being say it -- that I think actually changed the resonance for people. I will say it did push the panic...because it was human."

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Kind of a crazy story out of Atlanta today.

A local TV truck for WSB-TV hit some high voltage power lines when the crew forgot to lower the truck's transmission mast resulting in a giant explosion.

115,000 volts of electricity went through the truck as the explosion blew a hole in the road and ruptured a water line. Both the reporter and cameraman inside escaped with no serious injuries.

On the 4pm newscast, CBS Atlanta's Stephany Fisher called the incident, "A frightening reminder of the dangers of covering news." Really? It seems like this is mostly about them just forgetting to lower the mast...

Filmmaker Andrew Rossi has been documenting the inner workings of the New York Times media desk for a project that could end up on HBO.

Rossi tells The New York Observer's John Koblin, "I think that these writers have something invested in their stories that is sort of unique compared to what it would have been like five years ago."

The project began with a focus on David Carr but now includes other reporters, including the founder of the blog you are reading right now, Brian Stelter. "He watches me edit, watches me write, watches me write emails, watches me tweet, watches me do interviews," said Stelter. "There are some days that are going to be more exciting."

Rossi hopes to document the work of the entire media desk over the next few months, but told Koblin the project is in the early stages and and could expand, or not be competed at all.

The season finale of 'Mad Men' aired last week and TVNewser phoned in the final recap for AgencySpy's "The Week in Advertising" (literally, not just metaphorically like usual).

You can watch "The Week in Advertising" on the the AgencySpy sidebar each Tuesday and see the archive of previous episodes here.

As Jon Stewart pointed out on his show last night (clip after the jump), it was neither he nor his writers who actually caught the "Hannity" protest footage mix-up that got mocked earlier this week and that Sean Hannity eventually apologized for on-air. It was "Daily Show" Associate Producer Ramin Hedayati who spotted it.

TVNewser got a hold of Hedayati who discussed the segment with us over email:

How'd you spot the Hannity clip?

It appeared to me in a potato chip. No, I was just going through media coverage of Bachmann's rally for that afternoon's meeting and noticed the weather change and the enormous size of the crowd. I started yelling "You switched the samples!" at the screen like Harrison Ford in the The Fugitive. I figured someone else would catch it over the weekend but we got lucky. Take that, Media Matters!

What was your reaction to Hannity's response?

I loved it. It was great to see him own up to a lie and, in doing so, lie about his lie being "inadvertent." He's a real talent.

Would you and Sean Hannity get along?

Sure, as long as we don't talk politics.

Are you a socialist liberal who hates America?

No, just "Hannity's America."

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FishbowlNY's Amanda Ernst has the picks from last night's TIME magazine Person of the Year panel. Barbara Walters, Gayle King, Rudy Giuliani and Top Chef's Tom Colicchio gave their picks. During the debate Giuliani discussed the influence of Roger Ailes, Rush Limbaugh, and Glenn Beck this past year. To that Gayle King said, "I'm getting ill."

• More on FishbowlNY...