NBC News celebrates Gregory’s numbers

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Switching hosts twice in recent months, with the death of Tim Russert and Tom Brokaw coming out of retirement to fill in only on an interim basis, had led to questions about whether “Meet the Press” would maintain its ratings dominance. Folks at NBC News can rest easy. The Sunday public affairs program has won every week thus far with David Gregory in the moderator’s chair.


Numbers from Sunday’s show aren’t in yet, but Gregory had a perfect record through the first five. He continued the Russert/Brokaw tradition, which made Meet the Press #1 in Households for 118 straight weeks. Also, since Gregory took over, the NBC show has continued to frequently beat its CBS and ABC competitors by over a million viewers.

For example, NBC says that the Nielsen tally showed the January 4th “Meet the Press” with 4.715 million viewers, compared to 3.633 million for CBS’ “Face the Nation” and 3.255 million for ABC’s “This Week.” Fox News Sunday on cable had 1.514 million.

For Q4 2008, which was mostly Brokaw, but Gregory for the final three weeks, Meet the Press averaged 4.595 million viewers, vs. 3.335 million for ABC’s This Week, 3.146 million for CBS’ Face the Nation and 1.502 million for Fox News Sunday.