Abc

Dale Loeslein of Wilmington Country Club teamed with Bill McDonald, Rusty Applegate and Joe Flickinger to win the $6,000 Izod Club Pro-ABC Championship of the Philadelphia PGA with a 17-under-par best-ball score of 53 yesterday at Reading Country Club. One stroke back at 54 were foursomes headed by Jody Barrett of Whitford Country Club and Gary Rodgers of Doylestown Country Club.

Channel 6 will lose about 5 percent of its yearly revenue because its parent company is no longer paying the station to carry certain sports and special programming, said an analyst who follows the company. The station, which is owned by New York-based Capital Cities/ABC, earns between $150 million and $175 million a year from advertising and the special compensation its receives from its parent company for broadcasting certain network programs. Jeff Tolvin, Capital Cities/ ABC's director of business information, said the compensation rate is based on how many households the station delivers to the network during daytime, prime time and weekends.

Looks as if Katie Couric's going to be the only female network nightly news anchor after all. ABC, whose Elizabeth Vargas has been going largely solo since her "World News Tonight" co-anchor, Bob Woodruff, suffered serious injuries while reporting from Iraq in January, announced yesterday that "Good Morning America's" Charles Gibson would replace Vargas at the anchor desk starting Monday. Though ABC News' statement quoted Vargas, who is pregnant and due in August, as saying that "what works best for me and my family is to return in the fall to '20/20' as I raise my new baby and young son," the naming of Gibson comes a week after "The CBS Evening News with Bob Schieffer" passed "World News Tonight" in the total-viewer Nielsen ratings for the first time since August 2001.

ABC will add six new series to its schedule in the fall, including the return of Peter Falk's popular Columbo and a new crime show starring Burt Reynolds. The network canceled eight others, including the expensive disappointment Dolly. The shakeup that second-place ABC officially announced yesterday was milder and more conservative than the changes made last week by NBC, the No. 1 network in prime time and the first to reveal its fall slate. NBC added eight new series. The longest-running series discarded by ABC were Hotel, ending after a five-year run, and Spenser: For Hire, shot down after three years on the little screen.

Tomorrow night, ABC, which has replaced Fox as the broadcast network everybody loves to hate, will air a very special episode of America's Funniest Home Videos. It's called "Nincompoop-a-rama. " The timing is less than fortuitous. In recent weeks, the Disney-owned network has been beaten up for apparent cluelessness on several fronts. Its ratings are down 20 percent from last year. And while it is sure to get a boost from tonight's Oscar telecast, it is locked in a battle with Fox for third place this season.

The ABCs of ABC's 16 days of Winter Olympics coverage, which gets under way Saturday night in Calgary, Alberta. A is for Americans. Those are the people ABC hopes win every medal available. Medals mean viewers, viewers mean ratings, and ratings mean dollars. Someday soon, someone ought to tell ABC not to get its hopes up. B is for Basketball, which isn't televised on ABC for the next two weeks. Instead, you will see Biathlon and Bobsledding. C is for Curling, a demonstration sport that ABC would be wise to avoid televising.

College football takes center stage at ABC this season as the network begins its coverage with the Pigskin and Kickoff classics next month and finishes up with the Fiesta Bowl on Jan. 4, 1999. ABC and ESPN released their schedules yesterday, with the highlight of ABC's package being the Fiesta Bowl, the designated national title game of the Bowl Championship Series. ABC also televises the other three games in the series - the Rose and Sugar bowls on Jan. 1, and the Orange Bowl on Jan. 2. In addition, ABC will have a nationally televised tripleheader on Dec. 3, with the Southeastern Conference, Big 12 and Western Athletic Conference championship games.

Annually, the most generous feast of quality golf served to television viewers is the U.S. Open. Today and tomorrow, ABC will cover all 18 holes during the third and fourth rounds of the national championship. Runner-up to the Open in the show-me-more race is the PGA, of which ABC telecast the final 14 holes last year. During every other golf tournament, as many as nine holes of the course remain unseen on TV. Eight announcers will call the play for ABC (Channel 6) in the 87th U.S. Open from the Olympic Club in San Francisco, beginning at 2:30 p.m. today and 3:30 p.m. tomorrow.

It's the trifecta no network would wish for: angry conservative Catholics, ticked-off liberal viewers, and eroding viewership. But ABC has pulled it off. The network, which opened its season with a cheeky ad campaign that suggested TV was bad, and that was OK, has got trouble on both ends of the political spectrum. First, there's Ellen. As in Ellen DeGeneres, the very out lesbian star who's turning into a latter-day Roseanne with her threats to quit her self-titled sitcom.

Chuck Howard has produced U.S. Open golf championships, major league baseball playoffs, All-Star games and Super Bowls for ABC-TV. But on Sunday, he will produce The Big One - ABC's first live coverage of the Indianapolis 500. "I don't mean to demean the others, but we have never done anything like this," Howard said yesterday during a break in preparation for the telecast. "The next thing I see, as a challenge from a production standpoint, is Calgary (for the 1988 Winter Olympics)