Viewership for the week of May 3 was a combined 19,410,000 for the ABC, CBS and NBC network newscasts according to the trade site MediaBistro.Com
This puts them behind radio talk show giant Rush Limbaugh who has 20 million plus weekly listeners according to Wikipedia citing the trade publication Talkers Magazine.
The breakdown is: 7,430,000 viewers for Brian Williams at NBC Nightly News; 7 million for ABC World News With Diane Sawyer; and 4,980,000 for Katie Couric at CBS Evening News.
Newsbusters.org did a little research and found that that is a combined loss of 1.67 million viewers from the week of May 4, 2009.
And 70 percent of the viewers of network news is over the age of 54.
The good news for the nets is they still beat Sean Hannity who has 16 million radio listeners and 1.9 million viewers of his Fox News Channel show.
OTOH, Laura Ingraham, Mark Levin and Dave Ramsey, who are tied for 6th place among radio talk show hosts with about 6.25 million weekly listeners, handily spank Katie Couric.
Now, there is a bit of apples vs. oranges in making these comparisons since radio audience is determined by Arbitron and is based on unduplicated listeners, while the TV networks use Nielsen Media Research which reports an average of nightly viewership over the week with obviously most of the same people watching each night.
A year ago, however, the answer as to who touches more would not be debated.
