Sumner Redstone had already decided to fire Viacom CEO Tom Freston a week before he got rid of Tom Cruise, according to reports that came to light Tuesday. Philippe Dauman, who was selected to replace Freston, told today's (Wednesday) Daily Variety that he received an offer from Redstone three weeks ago. (Only a few weeks earlier, Redstone had told the Wall Street Journal that "he could imagine 'no circumstance' under which he would dismiss Mr. Freston.") When Redstone severed ties with Cruise on Sept. 22, news reports made much of the fact that neither Freston nor Paramount Chairman Brad Grey appeared to have been aware of the action and both remained silent about it for days. Redstone said Tuesday that his decision to fire Freston "has nothing to do with Tom Cruise." [UBS media analyst Aryeh Bourkoff told today's New York Daily News that the "Cruise situation showed Sumner Redstone getting more involved with managing Viacom."] Rather, he said, he was concerned with Viacom's stagnant stock price and Freston's conservative approach to the Internet. Daumon, he maintained, will be "better able to navigate the digital transition." Analysts were mostly critical of Redstone's action. "We think this move is likely to be regarded as an attempt by Mr. Redstone to reassert himself in an operating role, a development that is not likely to be warmly received in the investment community," Merrill Lynch analyst Jessica Reif Cohen told clients. Bear Stearns analyst Spencer Wang said that he was "surprised by this announcement and somewhat disappointed as we view Tom Freston as a very strong operator with a very solid track record." Anthony Valencia, with TCW Group, told the Los Angeles Times that he believed Freston's ouster was "premature." He added, "Every company needs to have a long-term, consistent strategy, and getting rid of your senior executives every few years by definition prevents that from happening." Redstone had previously got rid of Frank Biondi in 1996 and Mel Karmazin in 2004. Bruce Greenfeld, professor of finance at Columbia, told the New York Times, "Sumner has just lost it. ... This guy [Freston] has been working for him for 20 years. He has one bad year and he gets rid of him." Investors seemed to agree with the analysts as Viacom stock plunged 5.6 percent to $34.89 on the news, and continued falling today to $33.94 at midday.

Disney's football flick Invincible scored another touchdown over the Labor Day weekend, staying well ahead of its rivals for the second week in a row. According to final figures released by Exhibitor Relations Tuesday, the Mark Wahlberg starrer earned $15.4 million over the four days, putting its two-week gross at $38.1 million. Lionsgate's Crank premiered with $12.9 million, just ahead of Warner Bros.' The Wicker Man, starring Nicolas Cage, which earned $11.7 million. Another new film, the basketball-themed Crossover, failed even to make the top ten, fouling out with just $4.4 million. Fox Searchlight, however, continued to beam over the success of the indie Little Miss Sunshine, which raked in $9.6 million -- up 3 percent over the previous week. Also impressing was The Illusionist, which took fifth place with $8.1 million despite playing in only 971 theaters. It produced the weekend's highest per-screen average among the top 10 -- $8,362.

The top ten films over four-day Labor Day weekend, according to final figures compiled by Exhibitor Relations (figures in parentheses represent the Friday-Sunday totals): 1. Invincible, ($12.2 million) $15.4 million; 2. Crank, ($10.5 million) $12.9 million; 3. The Wicker Man, ($9.6 million) $11.7 million; 4. Little Miss Sunshine, ($7.6 million) $9.6 million; 5. The Illusionist, ($6.3 million) $8.1 million; 6. Talladega Nights. ($6.1 million) $7.6 million; 7. Barnyard, ($4.9 million) $6.6 million; 8. World Trade Center, ($4.6 million) $5.9 million; 9. Accepted, ($4.6 million) $5.62 million; 10. Step Up, ($4.5 million) $5.61 million.

As expected, all eyes were on Katie Couric Tuesday night as her debut as anchor of The CBS Evening News registered a 9.1 rating and a 17 share, according to Nielsen Research. It was the highest rating the program had recorded since 1998. By contrast, ABC's World News with Charles Gibson placed second with a 5.7/10 and NBC Nightly News with Brian Williams placed third with a 5.3/10. Even CBS executives were quick to acknowledge that the ratings were affected by the curiosity factor. In an interview with Broadcasting and Cable, CBS News President Sean McManus said, "What's more important is what the audience will be six months and a year from now."

Couric's big "get" for her first newscast was Suri Cruise, or at any rate the first photograph of the 5-month-old daughter of Tom Cruise and Katie Holmes, taken by celebrity photographer Annie Leibovitz for the cover of the upcoming edition of Vanity Fair magazine. The photograph was displayed about two-thirds of the way through the program. TV critics gave the program mixed reviews, with several observing that it was hardly a news program at all. Howard Kurtz in the Washington Post remarked, "The number of full-fledged stories about something that happened yesterday amounted to -- let me count here -- one..." Nevertheless, Kurtz remarked, "I'm sure some will say there wasn't enough news in the 'Evening News.' And they will have a point. But that's the tradeoff if you're going to do longer, more textured pieces and new features on a half-hour broadcast." MSNBC commentator Michael Ventre remarked, "Note to Katie: It's called the CBS Evening NEWS for a reason." "They should have devoted at least 15 minutes to much harder news," Fordham University media professor Paul Levinson told Reuters. Former ABC newsman Bob Zelnick, currently a journalism professor at Boston University, told the Association Press, "I felt the show, taken as a whole, had too much softness to it." "The real test, of course, lies ahead," wrote USA Today TV critic Robert Bianco. "We'll have to see how well she wears over time, and how well she handles her first crisis. When news breaks, will viewers want to hear it from Couric?"

Although CBS had trumpeted that the program would be carried simultaneously on television and the Internet, anyone attempting to access it live on the West Coast received a message saying, "Please come back later when The CBS Evening News airs on your local CBS station." But some Internet bloggers reported that they had problems accessing the program even on the East Coast. One person wrote that she had tried to watch on four different set-ups but "I never got any of them to work." Another said that he wasn't even able to watch the "on demand" version; only the commercials played. He concluded, "After all that hype about multicasting, you'd think CBS would have paid more attention to insuring that interested viewers could take advantage of this innovation." On the program itself, Couric encouraged viewers to consult the CBS website to learn more about the features presented on the program.

ABC's upcoming miniseries The Path to 9/11, which airs next Sunday and Monday nights, is being criticized as biased and inaccurate from all sides, the New York Times reported today (Wednesday). Among the critics, the newspaper observed, is former counterterrorism czar Richard A. Clarke, who says that one of the scenes showing Osama bin Laden being allowed to escape the capture of American military officers and North Alliance forces prior to 9/11 "didn't happen. ... It's utterly invented." Clarke is currently a paid consultant to ABC News. ABC issued a statement observing that the miniseries was "a dramatization, not a documentary, drawn from a variety of sources." And former Gov. Thomas H. Kean of New Jersey, a member of the 9/11 commission, defended the drama, calling the controversial scene a "composite." However, Richard Ben-Veniste, another member of the 9/11 commission, said that he and several other commission members saw the film last week and were now "trying to think how [the producers] could have misinterpreted the 9/11 commission's finding the way that they had." Meanwhile, the Columbia Journalism Review reported on its website Tuesday that it appears that CBS will "cave in to puritan activists" and remove offending four-letter words in a documentary depicting the 9/11 events. Two earlier versions of the same documentary had allowed the language to be included.