TUBE TALK Despite complaints from many families of terror victims that Sunday night's ''9/11'' documentary on CBS was airing too soon or freshly exploiting their tragedy, the broadcast drew the highest rating of any non-sports program of the TV season. An average of 39 million people tuned in to the Robert De Niro-hosted special....
First Oprah, now Sally. Sally Jessy Raphael, host of the longest-running daytime talk show, announced she's leaving the air just one day after a similar announcement by Oprah Winfrey. But while Oprah is leaving voluntarily, and not for four more years, Raphael's show is being canceled in April. Despite its decreasing ratings, Raphael told the New York Post that 70 percent of the syndicated show's outlets had picked it up again for next year. But the key New York City station was not one of them, and Studios USA decided to pull the plug about six weeks shy of what she says would have been the show's 20th anniversary. With Jenny Jones' talk show also in trouble, stations and syndicators could be scrambling to fill some large daytime holes very soon.
SOUND BITES Just in case you were worried, Britney Spears and Justin Timberlake haven't broken up yet, despite rumors of him dirty-dancing with someone else and of her drowning her sorrows at various L.A. clubs. Or so says Spears of the break-up rumors, denying them Monday on MTV Europe during a stop in Germany. ''No, that's not true. Me and Justin did not split up,'' she said. So there.
COVER TO COVER Sci-fi giant Isaac Asimov, who wrote the ''Foundation'' series and several hundred other books, died of heart and kidney failure at age 72 in 1992. Or so the world was told. However, the New York Post reports that ''It's Been a Good Life,'' a posthumous memoir due out later this month, will reveal that Asimov actually died of AIDS. Compiled from his notes and essays by his widow, Janet, the book is said to describe how he contracted the disease through an infected blood transfusion during bypass surgery in 1983.
PASSING NOTES Three-time Tony-winning actress Irene Worth, died in New York on Sunday after suffering a stroke. The 85-year-old actress, whose career spanned six decades, was such a grande dame of the British stage that many theatergoers didn't know she was born in Omaha, Nebraska. On Broadway, she won Tonys for her work in Edward Albee's ''Tiny Alice,'' Tennessee Williams' ''Sweet Bird of Youth,'' and Neil Simon's ''Lost in Yonkers,'' a role she recreated in the 1993 film version....
Thomas Leahy, who worked at CBS for 30 years and was president of the network from 1986 to 1989, died Friday of cancer in New York. Leahy, who served at CBS from 1962 to 1992, was 64.
