Evening News Ratings: Week of August 23

A less than stellar summer week for the three network evening newscasts. As we mentioned, the “CBS Evening News with Katie Couric” tied an all-time low. The nation’s #1 newscast, “NBC Nightly News” also lost viewers during a week the show sent its star anchor Brian Williams to the Gulf Coast to anchor two days of broadcasts on the 5th anniversary of Hurricane Katrina. “World News with Diane Sawyer” was the only show of the three to increase viewers week-to-week — up 80,000.

And not a good sign from the younger viewer department — none of the shows broke the 2 million viewer average in the A25-54 demo. That’s the first time that’s ever happened. The last time “Nightly News” was under 2 million viewers in the demo was the week of July 2, 2007 when the show averaged 1.91M viewers. That same week “World News with Charles Gibson” drew 2.2 million A25-54 viewers.

	NBC	ABC	CBS
• Total:	7,230,000	6,590,000	4,890,000
• A25-54:	1,990,000	1,710,000	1,490,000

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