It was a pretty busy news week, but all three evening newscast lost viewers last week compared to the week prior. “NBC Nightly News” remained the top newscast, but “ABC World News” narrowed the gap to 430,000 total viewers. It was 780,000 the first week of last month.
ABC topped NBC in the demo Tuesday and also in total viewers Wednesday, a first since Diane Sawyer took over the program in December. An NBC insider tells us that the lead-in was particularly tough during an aggressive sweeps week (“Oprah” airs in the afternoon on ABC stations in some top markets including New York, Los Angeles, and Philadelphia).
While the first-place gap has shrunk considerably of late, the gap between ABC and “CBS Evening News” has remained large, standing at 2.02 million viewers (440,000 demo).
Numbers for the week of May 3:
| NBC | ABC | CBS | |
|---|---|---|---|
| • Total: | 7,430,000 | 7,000,000 | 4,980,000 |
| • A25-54: | 2,180,000 | 1,970,000 | 1,530,000 |