TVSquad

Jenna Hager, the daughter of former President George W. Bush, will be joining the Today show as a part-time correspondent on issues such as education. Hopefully this won't interfere with her other job as a schoolteacher in Maryland. Since the job is only slated for about once a month, I don't think her second job will interfere with her day job quite as much as my second job as a freelance writer interferes with mine.

I just wonder if Jenna's lineage has anything to do with this new part-time job of hers. Granted she's authored two books by the age of 27, but I have to ask if anybody with a little more experience could have taken the Today show job.

Of course this could turn into a full-time gig for her which means she would have to quit her teaching job and kiss her tenure goodbye (unless she returned to teaching later on and started all over again). How would she survive if that happened? Oh yeah, she's a Bush.

If you tuned in to Nightline last night, you saw a report from the Congo about the political and humanitarian crisis there. But, the interesting part about it was who was reporting the story: Ben Affleck.

According to Reuters, Affleck has made three trips out to the Congo, and he contacted ABC News to see if they wanted to send a camera crew along with him. He also wrote an essay about his trips for the late-night news program's website. It's a refreshing view from Ben, whose trips to the war-torn country have mostly been under wraps.

"I view this as a long and ongoing learning experience to educate myself before making any attempt to advocate or 'speak out,'" Affleck writes. He also says that "it makes sense to be skeptical about celebrity activism. There is always the suspicion that involvement with a cause may be doing more good for the spokesman than he or she is doing for the cause."

As a Giants fan, I was completely bummed when Tiki Barber announced that he was going to retire at the end of the 2006 season. Heck, he's the best running back the team's ever had, and he was in the middle of his peak-performance years (he won't turn 32 until April). But Tiki had a vision; he knew he had a future in media, since he had been working on local TV, then Fox and Friends, even while he was playing. He figured it would be better to start that future now, rather than after a couple of more years of being pounded to a pulp by 300-pound linemen.

His future starts today, as NBC announced that they have signed Barber not only to work in the Football Night in America studio next season, but also work as a correspondent for Today, where he'll start in April. This isn't a surprise, given Barber's previous morning-show experience at the Fox News Channel. Not sure what Barber will report on, but I'm sure it won't just be sports-related issues. Could they be grooming him for hosting duties on the show's fourth hour? Who knows...

[via TV Week]

Ted Koppel appears to have landed on his feet after the demise of Nightline, and yet another figure from that show has also found new employment. This time it's David Marash, who left Nightline as a correspondent last year. Marash will be the chief anchor and correspondent of Al-Jazeera International's Washington bureau when the new network launches this spring. Al-Jazeera International will be a 24-hour news channel. Four hours of each day would be dedicated to news out of Washington, in addition to a one-hour newscast co-anchored by Marash.