GOOD MORNING AMERICA SET TO OVERTAKE TODAY NEXT WEEK

It may turn out to be the irony of ironies. For the first time in seven years, ABC’s Good Morning America seems likely to overtake NBC’s the Today show in the ratings next week, the New York Times observed today (Friday). Already, GMA has moved to within 137,000 viewers behind Today, according to last week’s Nielsen ratings. And next week Katie Couric, the onetime Today show co-host, will be co-hosting the rival morning talk show on ABC. During one week in October 2007, Good Morning America was the winner on two mornings — but viewers would have to go back to December 1995 to find a time when it came out ahead for an entire week. Commented the Times: “With one of the most popular Today hosts of all time, Katie Couric, now scheduled to sit in for a week as guest host on GMA next week, the morning ratings will probably be as intensely scrutinized inside those two networks as those hanging chads were in Florida in 2000.”