ABC Says Nightly News Is “Losing Its Fizz”

An NBC spokesperson compares ABC’s World News name change to the arrival of New Coke in the latest TV Week. In an e-mail to TVNewser, an ABC spokesperson responds: “While its spokesperson may be joking about the name change at World News, there should be very little laughter at NBC News given Nightly’s declining ratings and World News’ five week winning streak. The soda analogy lends itself mightily to Nightly News which seems to be losing its fizz.”

> Update: 3:51pm: The winning streak is a reference to the 25-54 demographic. “But when you look at the facts you’ll see that for three of those five weeks (6/12, 6/19, 7/3) ‘Nightly News’ didn’t even air at full coverage or had an abnormal lead in due to sports coverage,” an NBC e-mailer says. In the other two weeks, ABC and NBC had a statistical tie in the demo (although ABC had slightly more actual demo viewers)…