ABC’s ‘World News’ Outstrips NBC’s ‘Nightly News’ In News Demo, Ending Its 243-Week Streak
ABC News continues to pound away at NBC News. World News With Diane Sawyer just broke NBC Nightly News’s 243-week winning streak in the news demo. Di’s newscast ranked No. 1 for the week of July 22 in 25-54, beating Brian Williams’ newscast by 38,000 viewers in the age bracket. This marks ABC’s largest demo margin over NBC’s newscast in nearly five years. Ironically, Di was off Wednesday through Friday of last week, while Williams was in the anchor chair all week. David Muir filled in for Di those three nights. More to the point, on Wednesday, ABC’s evening newscast led with Royal Baby coverage and, on Thursday with Robin Roberts’ interview with the George Zimmerman trial juror. But ABC News had been pointed in this direction, ratings-wise for some time. One week earlier, for the first time in nearly four years, its newscast edged out NBC’s twice in a single week, following a 10-week period in which ABC‘s newscast beat NBC‘s once a week on five occasions, with head-to-head regular telecasts — always on a Friday night. But the week of July 14, ABC News‘ demo wins happened on Monday and Tuesday. Among viewers of all ages, World News delivered some of its closest numbers relative to Nightly of the past 42 weeks. Di clocked 7.287 million viewers. Brian bagged 7.536 mil (Scott Pelley logged 5.954 million). With these stats Di slashed her overall audience gap relative to Brian, week-to-week (-62%, 249,000 vs. 659,000).
The win is just the latest notch in ABC News’ ratings bedpost. It’s morning infotainment show, Good Morning America already has subdued NBC News’ Today Show – most recently scoring its first May sweep win in the news demo and among all viewers for the first time in nearly two decades – its third consecutive sweep victory in both breakdowns.
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