This would be cause for outrage or at least monopoly-conspiracy theories in almost any other spectrum of the media. But because of the sleaze factor and the guilty pleasure anyone with more than a high school education feels in reading the tabs, media watchers have been to slow to react. And when they have, it has been with characteristic condescension.

“Aliens Take Over the Tabloids!” Time magazine trumpeted in a parody of tabloid style. “Exclusive! New Exec Grabs No. 3; Jonbenet In Danger!” it concluded. The new exec is David Pecker, head of American Media and the former CEO of Hachette-Filipacchi, and the “No. 3″ refers to the Globe (which follows the Enquirer and the Star in sales). Time talks to the executive about his plans for his family of sensationalistic siblings (“If there’s a Hollywood scandal, the investigative portion will be done by the National Enquirer,” says Pecker. “The impact on celebrities, on their careers, that will be done by the Star”) and noted that the genre itself is in trouble. Before the Globe acquisition, American Media titles sold a combined 4.4 million, which is flat from last year and down 35 percent from four years ago. The company has been trying to diversify, adding a National Enquirer TV show and Web site to its mix.

Part of Pecker’s mission has been to clean up the tabloids. He hired Roger Black to redesign the Enquirer and the Star, and though the difference between the before and after versions is rather subtle, the assignment itself is significant. Black is a ubiquitous figure in mainstream media (I did a book with him myself) and probably best known for his groundbreaking magazine face lifts. Rolling Stone, Newsweek, New York and Esquire all got the benefit of Black’s designing talents. And it’s safe to say that if any of these magazines had legs, they would probably run screaming from the room if you sat them beside the National Enquirer at a dinner party.

But Pecker sees a brighter day dawning for the Enquirer, if not its ilk. He has spoken of going after People’s audience — and here Time Inc. just thought it had Jann Wenner’s Us, which goes weekly in March, to worry about. And though the People people probably aren’t losing a lot of sleep over the prospect of a new, more mainstream National Enquirer, it’s worth noting that the tabloids are definitely on the radar of many slick publication editors. I have attended editorial meetings at People, In Style, Entertainment Weekly and even Vogue at which copies of the Enquirer and the Star were referenced, if not actually brandished. The general feeling has been that there’s usually something to the stories they report. And after the Enquirer proudly announced a few weeks ago that no celebrities were currently suing them, their reference value can only rise.

Or can it? Pecker has been known to squelch a few stories in his day. He famously fired the editor of Hachette’s Premiere years ago over a story about Planet Hollywood going broke, long before the theme restaurant chain actually went bankrupt, and never denied rumors that his friendship with the restaurant chain’s investors had anything to do with it. Are the days of deep-dish dirt in peril? Can the tabloids survive a “controlling authority” with friends in high places — or aspirations of class? And perhaps more important, where will the more mainstream magazines (which are sometimes indistinguishable from the tabloids in subject matter, if not presentation) get their gossip?

Hell if I know. For what it’s worth, I took a quick sample of this week’s tabs so you might not have to. And then I wrote it all off in the name of research.

The National Enquirer: If no one is suing it right now, it certainly isn’t making many friends among the celebrity set. From the cover story on Katie Couric’s wife-beating boyfriend, to the inside dirt on Sean Penn’s marital problems, the Enquirer is still the one most stars love to hate. Most sources are anonymous, of course, but given the mag’s legal bills you can imagine there’s a little something to every bit of dish in here. For the insufferably curious, for instance, there are pictures of Jodie Foster’s longtime companion plus this carefully worded sentence: “And she is so loyal to her best friend Cydney Bernard — who was by her side when [Foster's son] Charles was born — that the two wear matching wedding bands.”

Billed as “The New” Star, this tab is actually more celebrity friendly than the Enquirer. Sure, they managed to find photos of Cameron Diaz looking kind of like a bag lady and they say Michael Jackson’s marriage was a hoax (did you ever?) but a lot of the display text oozes concern. (This must be the “impact on celebrities” angle Pecker was talking about.) The Star’s story on Jodie Foster, supermom (running the same week as the Enquirer’s), makes no mention of the actress’s romantic life. And a piece on Paul McCartney’s new squeeze, Heather Mills, casts the loss of her leg six years ago in acceptably sentimental tones (“Brave beauty who captured McCartney’s heart”) but shows us only her beguiling face.

No such niceties for the third-rated Globe. The tab’s big spread on “Paul’s New Love” features a full-page shot of her sans prosthesis, smiling at the camera. (While many shots in the tabloids are bought at great price from paparazzi — ask Princess Di — quite a few come from stock.) The Globe is closer to most people’s conception of a supermarket tabloid, and in that bears more resemblance to some of the British dailies. An ex-boyfriend of “Sabrina, the Teenage Witch” star Melissa Joan Hart peddles his memoirs (and a few mementos) herein, and it was the Globe that set Frank Gifford up with that stewardess — an act that outraged even the Enquirer.

The National Examiner mixes such soft fodder as “a day in the life” of Brad Pitt and Jennifer Aniston with a cover story on the less-than-stellar pasts of Judge Judy and a half dozen other TV judges. There’s a story about one teenager’s quest to feed the homeless of the world alongside a roundup of serial-killer couples (not Brad and Jennifer) and part one of a six-part series on what to do after the rapture comes and you’re stuck on a godless earth with the rest of Satan’s tools. With this kind of identity crisis, the Examiner looks like the Talk magazine of the tabs.

Both the Sun and the Weekly World News have apocalypse on the brain, leading with “Billy Graham’s Doomsday Warning” (Sun) — or his “End Times Message,” as the News’ headline-speak would have it. (Clearly not an exclusive.) The Sun offers a rather ho-hum mix of tabloid fare: pictures of really fat people, a photo of an “unmistakable image of Christ” that appeared on a man’s patio door, an article on the “new devil’s triangle” (bye-bye Bermuda, hello Nova Scotia). For the real deal, check out the Weekly World News — the paper that rocked Washington with its photograph of Bill Clinton shaking hands with a space alien. This is the tab that could give Salon lessons in headline writing. Witness “Topless, Fire-Breathing Transsexual Knocks Out Power to 5,000 in Seattle” (they’re not making this stuff up) or “New Remote Control Device Gives Women Orgasms At Up to 80 Yards Away” or my favorite, “How to Tell If Your Dog Worships Satan.”

Then try looking for that story in People.

We take a look at some of the more egregious examples of stations trying to make this non-story work below.

In 2009, Katie Couric did a short segment on Friggatriskaidekaphobia, a phobia of Friday the 13th, which raises the question: Why do we need a name for something everyone has?

Then this year, Jeff Glor repeated Katie’s segment almost verbatim.

Also in 2009 was the amazing CBS exposé on the Friday the 13th Insane Clown Posse show. One of the most unintentionally funny segments in news history.

Other network news anchors took a different tack, asking if this could mean a bad day for the markets. But first: walking under a ladder!

 ABC  affiliates take a nontraditional route and go out to find some fun stuff to do on this bad luck holiday, because why not?

I’m starting to think the worst part of today is making it through corny TV spots.

It was not until she bumped into FOX News buddy, Greta Van Susteren, while walking away from the camera that Palin could think of a journalist to name. That’s right, “Greta Van Susteren is the most influential journalist!” she shouted. Hmm.

Palin appears at about 1:20 minutes in to the video:

Is the anonymous tipster just a classic decoy, designed to test the waters of public opinion before Couric and the network get down to negotiations? CBS News spokeswoman Sonya McNair said Sunday, “We have no announcements to make at this time. Until we do, we will continue to decline comment on rumor or speculation,” and Couric’s own spokesman likewise declined to comment.

But unlike so much of what comes down the rumor mill, the notion of Couric beating a hasty exit out of the Tiffany Network has the convincing ring of truth. Couric made history back in 2006 when she became the first woman to single-handedly anchor a nightly network news broadcast, a move considered unusual, largely because of her upbeat “Today” show personality.

And while Couric is a far more competent and knowledgeable journalist than she gets credit for – her effortless, idiocy-exposing interviews with Sarah Palin were a highlight of the 2008 election – the past few years have borne out that she’s also a newswoman whose distinctly human touch makes her better suited to the field than to the chair. Couric, unlike the self-deprecating, slow-jamming-to-the-news Brian Williams possesses a quickness and a warmth historically unique in the troika of network talking heads. She’s more like the always-up-for-getting-emotional Anderson Cooper, a man who shines best when firing questions at interviewees or pulling together impassioned reports from the scene of a breaking story. And it’s hard to imagine Diane Sawyer unselfconsciously dispensing wet willies in an “investigative report” on shaking the sillies out.

So where would Couric, who was chastised by David Letterman last month for copping to the fact that she’s “figuring out what I want to do and figuring out the future,” go next? Despite Letterman’s insistence that “Once you take that chair, that’s what you do,” Couric, who cheerfully countered, “Is that CBS law?” has a number of possibilities. She admitted in an interview for next Sunday’s New York Times that she and Jeff Zucker “talk a lot and, yes, we’ve been discussing the possibilities” of a talk show for 2012 that would be a place “for smart conversation.”

Couric has, for her entire career, had to figure out how to deftly wear the persona that her audience responds to – that friendly disposition that helped make her a news star – while fighting off the criticism that an anchor must resemble God in full commandment-delivering mode. In her Times interview, she dismisses the charge of not possessing gravitas by calling the word “Latin for ‘testicles,’ by the way” and admitting she’s bristled at the “sexist undertone” of being categorized as “perky.” “It meant shallow and cute, but not somebody who had any depth,” she says.

Depth doesn’t have to come at the expense of humanity – far from it. If and when she leaves, it won’t be with her perky tail between her legs. The real question is why evening news viewers are still so reluctant to accept someone a little looser delivering the big stories of the day. And though Couric admits, “We probably would have been better off playing it a little safer,” it seems she’s ready to redefine “better off.” She certainly seemed to be dropping a big clue to her next move when she told Hemispheres magazine this month that, “I sometimes miss the connection I had with ‘Today’ Show viewers, because I was very much myself. I could be spontaneous. People felt like they knew me because they sort of did.” In her long career in the public eye, viewers have indeed come to know Couric – and not as someone who couldn’t take the “CBS Evening News” out the dumpster, but as a competent journalist with a distinctive set of talents. That’s why to those of us who admire what she does so well, the idea that she might be “better off” talking to people instead of dispensing headlines isn’t news at all.

After those first few weeks, the “CBS Evening News” settled into third place in the ratings and is well behind leader Brian Williams at NBC’s “Nightly News” and second-place Diane Sawyer at ABC’s “World News.”

No departure date has been set for Couric. Her CBS News contract expires on June 4.

“We’re having ongoing discussions with Katie Couric,” said CBS News spokeswoman Sonya McNair on Sunday. “We have no announcements to make at this time. Until we do, we will continue to decline comment on rumor or speculation.”

Said Matthew Hiltzik, Couric’s spokesman: “Ditto.”

Still, discussions are already under way about who will replace Couric on the evening newscast. Russ Mitchell, Scott Pelley and Harry Smith are among the internal CBS candidates, and new CBS News Chairman Jeff Fager is also expected to look outside the company.

Couric, who was on vacation last week, was reluctant to talk about her future when she appeared on fellow CBS host David Letterman’s show on March 22. “Once you take that anchor chair, that’s what you do,” Letterman told her.

“Really?” Couric answered.

“Look at Walter Cronkite, look at Tom Brokaw, look at Brian Williams, look at Peter Jennings, look at all these people,” Letterman said. “They get in it, they saddle up and they ride into the sunset.”

Couric smiled widely and said she loved doing the evening news and was proud of her work, but made no future commitments. Despite the ratings problems, the “CBS Evening News” won the Edward R. Murrow Award as best newscast in 2008 and 2009. Couric’s interview with then-Republican vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin in 2008 was a memorable moment in the campaign after Palin couldn’t or wouldn’t answer Couric’s question about books or magazines she regularly read.

Even with those high points, broadcast news economics had changed markedly since she signed on with CBS and her reported $15 million a year salary became increasingly hard to justify for a third-place telecast. Fager, the “60 Minutes” executive producer, was installed as CBS News chairman two months ago and new executives frequently like to put their own stamp on newscasts.

Rome Hartman, Couric’s first executive producer at the “CBS Evening News,” said that while Couric’s tenure clearly didn’t work out as well as CBS hoped, “I don’t think it’s right to think of it as, or call it, a failure.”

For the first time in many years, a network tried to increase the number of viewers watching the evening news instead of trying to steal a bigger slice out of an ever-shrinking pie, said Hartman, editor of “BBC World News America.”

“There are people who love Katie and those who don’t love her and that was a factor,” he said. “But it was the overall dynamics. There was a rock that we couldn’t move and I don’t think it would have mattered who we would have put in there.”

Although Couric will leave the evening news, she might not leave CBS. The CBS Corp. is a powerful force in the syndication business as owners of “Dr. Phil” and “Judge Judy,” and the upcoming departure in May of Oprah Winfrey will leave a huge void in the talk show marketplace. Through CBS-owned stations, the company could give a big head start to a Couric show. Due to the sales calendar, such a show would not likely begin until fall 2012.

A syndication deal with CBS is seen as the only possibility that Couric would continue as evening news anchor on a temporary basis past June, if she were to agree to stay during an extended search for her successor.

Other chief contenders for Couric’s services are NBC and Telepictures. NBC is her old home, but is not considered a big player in the talk show business. It tried and failed to launch a show for Jane Pauley, one of Couric’s predecessors on “Today.” Telepictures is bigger in the marketplace, producing “Ellen” and a new show with Anderson Cooper debuting in the fall, both of which could take potential time slots away from Couric.

Each of the companies has related news divisions where Couric could have some visibility before starting a talk show — at CBS, NBC or CNN, through Telepictures.

The personality that Couric could be expected to readily display on the talk show circuit could be seen last week in a video posted by aol.com. Couric, who has actively encouraged Americans to get colonoscopies since her husband died of colon cancer, took a humorous look at undergoing her own test. Her doctor jokingly noted that he had found a Batman doll while looking at Couric’s internal organs.