ON the morning after the weekend of watching the bearers of the bad news that John F. Kennedy Jr., his wife Carolyn and her sister Lauren Bessette were presumed lost at sea after a small-plane crash, we were still tethered to the TV.

We needed our fix of news, non-news and anecdotes related to this latest in the string of tragedies that had struck the country’s most famous political dynasty.

As we flipped around, leaving the cable channels for later in the day, when the bigger network news operations were in idle, we were reminded of what a steep hole “CBS This Morning” has to climb out of when Bryant Gumbel & Co. take over this fall, simply because we didn’t even think to flip over there.

We also noted that “Good Morning America” proves that one can indeed dig out of that hole and keep up with the big boys and girls at “Today,” who could be hearing the ghost of Satchel Paige whispering never to look back because you might see someone gaining on you.

Whether it was Jim Hall, the National Transportation Safety Board chairman, or the chopper eye in the sky over what was at that early hour limited activity over the seas off Martha’s Vineyard, to the Rev. Billy Graham, who had talked to Kennedy and his wife about the secrets of a long marriage, “GMA” got themon the air first.

It wouldn’t be until the 8 o’clock half hour that Katie Couric, stationed to direct our attention to the unseen family within the Kennedy compound, would conduct her satellite interview with Graham.

In the first half hour, after dispensing what harder news there was to convey, “Today” interviewed two people who’d become ubiquitous over the weekend Doris Kearns Goodwin and Hugh Sidey, who’d come to know the Kennedys through their careers as historian and Time journalist, respectively.

At the same time, Gibson was doing a satellite interview with John Perry Barlow, a rancher who hired the tenderfoot Kennedy at age 17, at the request of Jacqueline Kennedy, who he respected for having nudged her son “out of the nest … into the arms of a Republican rancher from Wyoming.”

But later, during an all-Kennedy “View,” ABC News’ Barbara Walters sounded as if she’d been watching the NBC News show on which she got her TV break. She quoted Goodwin.

Both shows aired interviews with Douglas Brinkley, a historian and friend of Kennedy and the son of David Brinkley, who had worked for both networks. “Today’s,” live in the studio with Matt Lauer, aired first. “GMA’s,” taped over the weekend, aired shortly thereafter.

Both shows also got impossibly squishy in their last half hours: Lauer talking with People’s Carol Wallace (among the many of the magazine’s staffers who was celebrating People’s 25th anniversary in Portugal when the alarm bells summoned them home); and Connie Chung struggling to make a graceful whole out of interviews with two magazine editors (Allure’s Linda Wells with Chung in the studio; In Style’s Hal Rubenstein via satellite) about Carolyn Bessette Kennedy’s understated style.

Chung was in because Diane Sawyer, who was close to Kennedy, had been sidelined by grief throughout the blanket coverage over the weekend.

At press time, it remained uncertain when Sawyer might return to “GMA.”

But it was very clear that Kathie Me Gifford should take a cue from Sawyer’s sense of decorum.

Gifford, dressed in a little black dress accessorized with white tissues, dabbed at her heavily lined eyes as she told “Live” co-host Regis Philbin and viewers “you don’t make it about you, right … but you have memories and things.”

Gifford, now a Vineyard resident and frequent flier of the same private-plane route Kennedy made, shared memories that included once having been on the beach off which the plane was presumably swallowed up and of having quoted Corinthians to Ethel Kennedy in the aftermath of the 1998 skiing death of Michael Kennedy.

Michael had been estranged from Frank Gifford’s daughter Victoria after an affair with a babysitter, and Kathie Me had returned from that funeral loaded for bear, lashing into the media for having misreported the details of that affair.

The babysitter, she said, was of legal age of consent in Massachusetts when the affair began, thus making herself the star of someone else’s drama.