During the morning trawl, I come across this report that tells us how since the (semi-disgraced?) news person Brian Williams of NBC took some sort of semi-retirement because he semi-lied, viewer figures had improved for the NBC news show under his substitute:
NBC’s viewers aren’t missing Brian Williams.
Its Nightly News, with substitute anchor Lester Holt, averaged a first-place 10.1 million viewers last week, a 416,000-viewer advantage over ABC’s World News with David Muir that widened slightly from the previous week, the first full week after Williams’ six-month suspension, when NBC claimed a 398,000-viewer advantage. ABC averaged 9.7 million last week, while the CBS Evening News with Scott Pelley, a perennial third-place finisher, netted 8.5 million.
Among the core audience of adults ages 25 to 54 that network newscasts sell to advertisers, ABC had a tiny edge last week, with 2.57 million viewers to NBC’s 2.55 million, reversing the previous week’s pecking order. (CBS had 2.03 million.)
Whole thing here, but read that excerpt again and take a good sniff at those numbers.
The USA has a population of 319m people.
There were a total 28.3m of viewers of the three nightly news shows.
About a quarter of those, 7.15m people, are the 25-54 range.
Bottom line: Stop caring about the Brian Williamses and whether they’re liars or not right now. It’s all over.