photoshop is more common than you'd think for pictures.
Avid is used a LOT for news package editing, and it has a titler that you can write text on.
Adobe After Effects is often used to make animated graphics like the ones you see on the evening news (the flying station logo, etc)
They also have dedicated graphics generators that they make the credits, the captions, the titles etc. that you see during a show. The graphic gens are hooked directly into the production switcher which lets them display the graphics by themselves or on top of video.
http://videosystems.com/ar/video_pla...nity/index.htm gives you an overview of Trinity, which is a fairly popular graphics gen in TV stations.