2005 Annual Report - Network TV Audience

The Sunday-morning talk show world has been dominated in recent years by NBC's Meet the Press, hosted by its Washington bureau chief, Tim Russert. That continued in 2004. According to the January 9, 2005 issue of USA Today, Meet the Press averaged 4.3 million viewers for the season.²⁰ That would be a slight decline from the program's reported average viewership for the 2002-2003 season,²¹ 4.7 million, but still reflects a comfortable lead over both CBS's Face the Nation and ABC's This Week.²²

Face the Nation, hosted by Bob Schieffer, continues to be second with an average of about 3.8 million viewers in 2004.²³ It is also the only half-hour program of the Sunday interview shows.

ABC, which revolutionized the Sunday format in the 1980s by converting the program to an hour, adding a reporter roundtable, multiple interviews and setup pieces built around host David Brinkley, struggled after Brinkley's retirement in 1996 (he contributed commentary pieces until 1997). This Week continues in third place in the Sunday morning news race with an average of 2.5 million viewers in 2004.²⁴

ABC News's president, David Westin, has bet on the former Clinton aide George Stephanopoulos as the new host. He persuaded Nightline's renowned executive producer, Tom Bettag, to take over the show. Bettag (who has since returned to Nightline as executive producer) is as highly regarded a program producer as there is in network TV. Many critics credit him for taking Nightline, one of the most acclaimed news programs in history, and making it markedly better, and reviving anchor Ted Koppel's passion for the show. Before that Bettag produced the CBS Evening News with Dan Rather when it was No. 1.

The Sunday morning time slot is the only one in which the cable-based Fox News Channel has a regular presence on the broadcast Fox network, with "Fox News Sunday with Chris Wallace." It ranks fourth with around 1.5 million viewers a week.²⁵

A discussion of the Sunday morning landscape would be incomplete without mention of Charles Osgood and CBS's Sunday Morning. The eclectic mix of arts, culture and politics celebrated its 25th anniversary in 2004, and (despite worries following Charles Kuralt's 1994 departure from the show) continues to draw a loyal and growing audience that reportedly exceeds some 4 million viewers a week.²⁶