Celebrating two years in the NBC Nightly News anchor chair, Lester Holt won the week and the quarter among younger viewers, while ABC’s World News Tonight David Muir won the week and the quarter among total viewers.
Nightly News has now won eight consecutive quarters in the demo, while viewers gave World News Tonight its largest Q2 lead over Nightly News in 10 years, since 2007.
Compared to the same quarter last year, all three newscasts saw viewer erosion. World News Tonight was down -3 percent in viewers and down -8 percent in the A25-54 demo, vs. Q2 2016, when the presidential race was heating up. Nightly News was down -5 percent in viewers and down -9 percent in the demo and the CBS Evening News, which made an anchor change last week, with the departure of Scott Pelley and the arrival of fill in anchor Anthony mason, was down -8 percent in viewers and down -13 in the demo.
Numbers for Q2, 2017:
| ABC | NBC | CBS | |
|---|---|---|---|
| • Total Viewers: | 7,735,000 | 7,648,000 | 6,124,000 |
| • A25-54: | 1,582,000 | 1,735,000 | 1,311,000 |
The weekly viewer loss was not as steep as the quarterly drop, with ABC down -1 percent in viewers and down -7 percent in the demo; NBC down -3 percent in viewers and down -10 percent in the demo and CBS was down -8 percent in viewers and down -11 percent in the demo.
Numbers for the week of June 19, 2017:
| ABC | NBC | CBS | |
|---|---|---|---|
| • Total Viewers: | 7,695,000 | 7,485,000 | 5,923,000 |
| • A25-54: | 1,537,000 | 1,662,000 | 1,290,000 |