“NBC Nightly News” beat CBS and ABC rivals across the board last week while Lester Holt was on the road for the special series “Across America,” which took him to Sacramento, Detroit, Fayetteville, N.C. and Washington, D.C.
“Last week is a perfect example of Lester’s commitment to reporting the news,” executive producer Sam Singal told TheWrap. “He launched our Across America series with insightful reporting and anchoring from three states in three days then headed to D.C. where he anchored nearly ten hours of live inauguration coverage. No one does it better. He and the entire Nightly team continue to set the standard,” he added.
NBC averaged 9.4 million viewers for the week of Jan. 18, compared to 9.2 million for ABC’s “World News Tonight.” The big weekly win put “Nightly News” ahead of in total viewers for the season. “CBS Evening News” finished third averaging 7.5 million viewers.
Among the key news demo of adults age 25-54, NBC averaged 2.4 million compared to 2.1 million for ABC’s newscast. CBS finished third with 1.6 million A25-54 viewers.
Holt had a busy day on Friday, leading NBC’s inauguration coverage from 10 a.m. through 5:45 p.m. ET before anchoring an hour-long edition of “Nightly News” and hosting “Dateline NBC” in primetime.
Despite the big week for NBC, all three newscasts were down from the same week last year, which is odd given that the week featured Trump’s inauguration. It’s impossible to definitively prove whether the decline was caused by calls to boycott inauguration coverage, but “Nightly News” dropped eight percent in viewers, while ABC dropped seven percent and CBS fell 11 percent. It should be noted that a year ago last week the polarizing Iran Nuclear deal dominated news coverage.