I am not aware of reports that anyone other than Colbert was a first choice to replace Dave - Dave himself has seemed less than enthusiastic about Colbert, but what have you heard about CBS specifically?
I am quite sure that your description of the ratings for the Katie-Cast are incorrect. It is hard to evaluate precisely - viewership levels vary by season of year, and by year in the presidential election cycle. However it is clear that after five years, CBS was still third in the ratings, and was further behind both first and second place than they had been before Katie. I have some numbers below to illustrate this; they don't prove it, because I could not easily get numbers for the same week in various years, but I am pretty confident this is the basic story: Six weeks into her run (October 2006, which is after the very high initial curiosity tune-in for Katie had worn off), the numbers were: 10/2006: NBC-8.8M(36.5%), ABC-8M (33%) CBS 7.3M (30%). This is based on 24.1M total viewers. Katie's 7.3M was reported as a 400,000 viewer improvement over Bob Schieffer's ratings at CBS the previous year, so let's put that at 6.8M. By April of 2010 (her last show was May 13, 2011), the ratings were: 4/2010: NBC-9.9M (40%), ABC-8.2M (33%), CBS-6.5M (26%). This is based on 24.6M total viewers. CBS spent $15M/year on Katie's salary, which required them to make cuts in other parts of the news budget. They may have gotten a short term gain over Schieffer, but by year four Katie was doing worse than her predecessor, and was getting a smaller percentage of the available audience. I do not have enough data to look specifically at how Katie did in the demo. For comparison, for the week of March 26. 2016: NBC-8.6M (36%), ABC-8.2M (34%); CBS-7M (29%). This is based on 23.9M total viewers. On Sun, Sep 4, 2016 at 3:49 PM, Steve Timko <[email protected]> wrote: > It came out that Colbert was not CBS' first choice to succeed Letterman. > Not even its second. > CBS is kind of a strange culture. I am probably not remembering this > correctly. Please correct my mistakes. But Katie Couric was hired with > great fanfare to replace Dan Rather. Her overall ratings went down compared > to Rather, but the ratings for NBC and ABC dropped as well. Couric actually > improved the rating in the demo. What she didn't do was move CBS into first > place i the evening news. Maybe for $15 million a year she was supposed to. > -- -- TV or Not TV .... The Smartest (TV) People! You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "TV or Not TV" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected] To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/tvornottv?hl=en --- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "TVorNotTV" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
