The Morning Feed: Katie Couric to launch Daytime Talk Show at ABC

Katie Couric, after becoming the first woman to helm a U.S. network TV newscast, announced Monday that she was joining the Disney/ABC Television Group to launch a daytime talk show in September 2012 as well as join the ABC News team.

Couric’s announcement did not surprise any media pundits since she’d been hinting at hosting a syndicated daytime talk show for some weeks. Still, Couric’s Disney/ABC Television Group deal meant that the 54-year-old on-air personality and journalist will end up working for all three major U.S. networks in her career following her stints at the CBS Evening News and NBC’s morning show, Today.

Asked about the format, Couric told The Hollywood Reporter that she envisions the show as a mix of news, information and fun.

“Well, the ink is barely dry,” Couric said. “We’ve started to talk about it in broad terms, and I think we’d like the show to be topical and to really capture the zeitgeist of what people are talking about.”

Couric’s daytime talk show announcement also stole the headlines away from her CBS Evening News anchor replacement Scott Pelley, who debuted Monday evening to mixed reviews.

Dutch writer/director Tom Six enjoyed worldwide attention yesterday when the British Board of Film Classification (BBFC) banned the DVD release of The Human Centipede II (Full Sequence), the sequel to his outrageous horror film The Human Centipede, about a mad scientist who kidnaps tourists in order to surgically turn them into his pet centipede monster.

The Guardian questioned the BBFC ruling because the board based their decision not on the content of the film — the story of a maniac obsessed with the first Human Centipede movie and trying to duplicate the experiments of the film’s make-believe mad scientist — but on the film’s link between sexual violence and pleasure.

Either way, Six clearly enjoyed the publicity and well as the unexpected political debate surrounding his niche horror movie.

The 54th International Art Exhibition, the Venice Biennale, opened June 4 to the public in the Giardini and the Arsenale in Venice, Italy. Dodie Kazanjian at Vogue listed some of the highlights from the world’s oldest biennial including Franz West’s reconstruction of his Vienna kitchen; Mike and Doug Starn’s massive sculpture Big Bambú and Richard Phillips’ 90-second-long film Lindsay Lohan.

The Venice Biennale runs through November 27, 2011.

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