ABC’S NEWSCAST FALLS ON NIELSEN’S RATINGS GLITCH

A week ago, ABC was celebrating the first ratings victory in years of ABC World News Tonight with David Muir over the longtime champ, NBC Nightly News with Brian Williams. Then came the admission by Nielsen that it had discovered a glitch that caused it to report inaccurate ratings over a seven-month period. Although the research company maintained that the errors were minor, they were sufficient to overturn ABC’s news win. Revised ratings released on Tuesday showed that the ABC newscast had received more than 300,000 viewers than it was entitled to and that NBC had received 33,000 viewers fewer. That put NBC back in the lead with 8.283 million viewers to 8.113 million for ABC. The NBC newscast also was on top last week. (See separate item.) Still, the final numbers were tight, and ABC issued a statement noting that fact and saying that it was "honored" that viewers are responding favorably to Muir’s assumption of the anchor role on the newscast after slightly more than one month on the job.