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NBC May Oust Evening News Executive
The NBC news anchor Brian Williams, left, worked on reports for the program as his executive producer, John Reiss, right, took a phone call. Executives at NBC say there are plans to replace Mr. Reiss.By BILL CARTER and JACQUES STEINBERG
NBC’s dominance in television’s evening news race is undergoing its most serious challenge in a decade as “World News” on ABC scored its second ratings victory in the last three weeks. The figures highlight the slow but steady ascent of the veteran ABC newsman Charles Gibson toward the top position among news anchors.
In what is being widely interpreted as fallout from the shifting ratings picture, NBC has made plans to replace the executive producer of the network’s “Nightly News With Brian Williams,” according to several NBC executives.
A successor to the current executive producer, John Reiss, may be announced as early as today, the NBC executives said, emphasizing that a change in the newscast had been in the works for several weeks and was not related to the most recent ratings results. The NBC executives asked not to be identified because the change had not yet been formally announced.
The looming change in the control room at “Nightly News” and the ratings surge by Mr. Gibson are but the latest developments in the most tumultuous two years in the recent history of broadcast news.
Mr. Williams succeeded Tom Brokaw in December 2004. After that, Dan Rather resigned as anchor at CBS in the midst of a reporting scandal, and was soon succeeded by Katie Couric. Peter Jennings died of lung cancer while still the lead anchor at ABC, and one of Mr. Jennings’s designated successors, Bob Woodruff, nearly died in a roadside bomb explosion in Iraq, setting off a sequence of events that ultimately led to Mr. Gibson’s move to the anchor desk at “World News.”
Only six months before Mr. Gibson got the evening news job, he was effectively passed over for it, in favor of two much younger journalists, making his current run at Mr. Williams’s broadcast all the more remarkable.
Even as some young viewers forsake television for the Internet, the three network newscasts continue to attract a collective audience of nearly 25 million viewers most nights. The programs are also among the most lucrative for the networks, with advertisers planning to spend nearly half a billion dollars on them this year.
More than a few viewers, and advertisers, choose their broadcast based on the personal strengths of those anchors. That has left some people at the networks wondering whether Mr. Gibson — who, at 63, is the oldest and most established of the three — may be proving more attractive to more viewers than Mr. Williams and Ms. Couric.
One NBC executive who did speak for the record yesterday, Steve Capus, the president of NBC News, would not confirm that any decision had been made about replacing Mr. Reiss. But he dismissed any conclusions being drawn from the recent ratings, saying that NBC had experienced surges by ABC during previous special ratings periods, known as sweep months. He all but guaranteed that NBC’s anchor, Mr. Williams, would regain supremacy in the ratings in a matter of weeks.
But the results for Mr. Gibson and ABC over the last month or so certainly present at least the potential that a tipping point may be coming in the evening news competition. If ABC’s newscast managed to eclipse NBC on Tuesday and last night by the same margins it has achieved in recent weeks, ABC will probably beat NBC for the entire sweep month of February, in both total viewers and in the chief advertising sales category for news, viewers from the ages of 25 to 54. That would be the first time ABC News had managed that double victory since November 1996.
Mr. Gibson’s progress in closing the gap with Mr. Williams had gone largely unnoticed in the initial torrent of attention that accompanied the arrival of the former host of NBC’s “Today” show, Ms. Couric, as the anchor of “CBS Evening News.”
Mr. Williams had led the news ratings virtually every week since taking over for Mr. Brokaw, the longtime leader, in December 2004.
Mr. Williams’s broadcast remains the most-watched among viewers this television season, drawing about 9.3 million each night, compared with 8.8 million for Mr. Gibson and 7.5 million for Ms. Couric, according to Nielsen Media Research.
But for the four-week period that began Jan. 29 and ended last Friday, Mr. Gibson’s broadcast was seen by an average of 9.69 million viewers a night, about 43,000 more than the 9.65 million who watched Mr. Williams’s newscast. (Ms. Couric’s CBS program trailed at 7.6 million.)
More notable has been the erosion in Mr. Williams’s lead over the last year. Erosion is not uncommon for the network newscasts, which have been steadily losing viewers. Still, Mr. Williams has lost an average of a little more than 570,000 viewers over the last year; Mr. Gibson’s audience has grown by just under 60,000 viewers.
Ms. Couric’s CBS newscast, which remains a distant third, has lost about 120,000 viewers from the program that was led last year at this time by Bob Schieffer. Asked yesterday whether any changes were in the offing for the CBS newscast, Sean McManus, the president of CBS News and Sports, said: “As we’ve said all along, this is a very long process that takes many months, if not years. We’re not losing any patience.”
Through a network spokesman, Mr. Gibson declined a request to be interviewed yesterday. What is perhaps most remarkable about his broadcast’s moving within striking distance of Mr. Williams’s — and perhaps causing NBC to react by shaking up its newscast’s management — is that Mr. Gibson is occupying the anchor chair at ABC at all.
At least twice in the last decade, ABC News marginalized Mr. Gibson’s role to the point that he contemplated leaving the network — only to have ABC call upon him to rescue a program.
The first time was in 1998 when, after 11 years as a co-host with Joan Lunden on “Good Morning America,” he left the program under pressure from network executives as its ratings sagged well below those of “Today” on NBC. At the time, he contemplated assuming a part-time role at ABC News, so that he might accept an offer to take a lead role as host of the “Biography” series on the A&E Network.
But less than a year after Mr. Gibson left “Good Morning America,” David Westin, the president of ABC News, urged him to reassume his post as co-host of the program, this time alongside Diane Sawyer, after the program sagged further under the anchor team of two neophytes, Lisa McRee and Kevin Newman.
In April 2005, after Mr. Jennings took leave of “World News Tonight,” as the program was then known, to be treated for lung cancer, Mr. Gibson was one of several anchors (including Ms. Sawyer and Elizabeth Vargas) who pinch-hit for him until his death in August 2005, and then continued to rotate in and out of Mr. Jennings’s empty chair for four months.
That December, Mr. Westin announced that he had selected Ms. Vargas and Mr. Woodruff, both in their 40s, as a permanent anchor team to succeed Mr. Jennings. In an interview on Dec. 5, the day of the announcement, Mr. Gibson, then 62, acknowledged that he had, effectively, been passed over for the job. At the time, it was widely believed that Mr. Gibson would leave “Good Morning America,” and probably ABC, when his contract was up in June 2007.
And yet, less than a month after the new anchor team began on “World News,” fate again played a hand in Mr. Gibson’s career. In late January, Mr. Woodruff was wounded and began a long recuperation. The plan for the anchor team was scrapped. Mr. Gibson was once again pressed into duty (as was Ms. Sawyer) to work with Ms. Vargas behind the anchor desk.
As for Ms. Vargas, she announced soon afterward that she was pregnant with her second child. Last May, Mr. Westin announced that the job of anchor of “World News” was now Mr. Gibson’s outright, and that he was leaving “Good Morning America.”
In an interview that day, Mr. Gibson said: “I am to some extent a creature of circumstance to horrendous events, Peter’s illness and Bob’s injury, and to a joyous event, but nonetheless one that affected all of us, which is the pregnancy for Elizabeth.”
On Tuesday night, in a stark reminder of that unsettled period, Mr. Gibson welcomed Mr. Woodruff back to the “World News” set, for an unusually long interview that touched on the details of his recovery .
Jon Banner, the executive producer of “World News” for Mr. Gibson (and Mr. Woodruff and Mr. Jennings before him), said: “To stand there with Charlie and Bob just before the broadcast was a miracle.”
