Sunday Show Ratings: Q4 2017

CBS’s Face the Nation With John Dickerson finished No. 1 in total viewers for Q4 2017, while NBC’s Meet the Press With Chuck Todd took top honors for the quarter among younger news viewers.

But each of the Sunday public affairs show lost viewers from last year, which isn’t a total surprise considering Q4 2016 happened to be a presidential election quarter!

Despite the year-over-year decline (-8 percent in total viewers and -16 percent among adults 25-54), Face the Nation still managed to post its second-best total total audience delivery for a Q4 in over 30 years. So while the program may have been down from last year, it’s still pretty popular.

Meet the Press continues to deliver the demos advertisers covet, including adults 25-54. Q4 2017 was the 8th consecutive quarter the program MTP won in the aforementioned demo, which is no small feat. On the downside, Meet the Press was -8 percent in total viewers and -15 percent in the demo versus Q4 2016.

ABC’s This Week with George Stephanopoulos took third place among total viewers, and was No. 2 in the key A25-54 category. This Week has now delivered more adults 25-54 than Face the Nation for the last 7 quarters  and for the 10^th time in the last 11 quarters overall.

But like its Sunday competition, the ABC politics program was down year-over-year: -12 percent in total viewers, and -10 percent in the news demo.

Hosted by Chris Wallace, Fox News Sunday had an interesting quarter, ratings-wise. The program posted the most significant year-over-year dropoff when it came to total viewers (-17 percent), but only lost -6 percent of its demo audience.

Editor’s Note: Face the Nation’s second half-hour was broadcast contiguously across 59.8 percent of the CBS affiliates.

The numbers for Q4, 2017:

*Al Punto ratings will be added when made available.

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