Cue Simon and Garfunkel’s “Bookends”: Barbara Walters is expected to retire in 2014.

EW has confirmed that Walters, 83, will sign off from ABC in May 2014. A series of specials are set to air that will pay tribute to her long career in broadcast news.

Walter’s decision to retire comes at a time when the 17-year-old The View is preparing to make significant changes. Joy Behar announced that she was leaving the network talk show at the end of the season, and rumors persist that Elisabeth Hasselback may join her out the door.

Walters co-created the show in 1997.

The fashion director of TLC’s hit show Say Yes to the Dress extended an olive branch to a conservative radio host after she blamed his wedding dress show for painting a biased portrait of homosexuality.

The American Family Association’s Sandy Rios said in a recent radio address that children have “heard nothing but positive things about homosexuality and its effects” because of shows like Say Yes to the Dress, which features gay fashion director Randy Fenoli, and Say Yes to the Dress Atlanta, which stars gay image consultant Monte Durham.

“We see the gay characters on the one in Atlanta and New York,” Rios said. “It has nothing to do with ‘like,’ but it is the face of the homosexual community that is painted with a positive brush, when those of us that have been involved in issues related to this know that there’s a very dark side, that this is not a good thing for people ultimately in their lives. It is a destructive force.” READ FULL STORY »

Jeopardy! isn’t the only show that may be looking to poach Anderson Cooper from CNN, it seems.

A new report reveals that NBC reached out to the cable news anchor as a potential replacement for Matt Lauer on Today by year’s end. Deadline says the news execs even went to Lauer to bless their choice, but their high-priced anchor expressed some disapproval. Lauer’s $25 million contract expires in 2014.

Cooper also has been rumored as a potential choice to take over for Alex Trebek when his contract expires in 2016. Ironically, Lauer’s name also came up as a possible replacement.

Lauer’s future at the No. 2 morning newscast has made headlines lately after he and his Today co-workers decided to give interviews about Ann Curry’s high-profile departure from the show and the state of their NBC show today.

More:

Matt Lauer was ready to jump to ABC

If you’re a 50-something black female writing on a TV show right now, consider yourself extremely lucky: there aren’t a heckuva lot of you around town these days.

According to a study commissioned by the Writers Guild of America, three groups remain sorely underrepresented on broadcast and cable series: women, minorities, and older writers. Some gains have been made but hey, Shonda Rhimes can’t write every show in prime time. Consider this statistic from the report released Tuesday: Between 1999 and 2012, the share of female writers rose only 5 percentage points, from 25 percent to 30.5 percent. At that rate, the study said, it would take another 42 years before women reach proportionate representation to men in the writers rooms.

During that same period, the hiring of minority writers increased from 7.5 percent to 15.6 percent — not bad, though minorities as a combined group remain underrepresented by more than 2 to 1. And though 40-something writers (see: white males) can still get plenty of gigs around town, nearly a third of the shows in the 2011-12 season had no scribes over 50. READ FULL STORY »