ABC’s ‘This Week’ Beats NBC’s ‘Meet The Press’ In February Sweep For First Time In 22 Years

by Lisa de Moraes

ABC’s This Week beat NBC’s Meet the Press in the news demo for the February sweep – the first time that’s happened in 22 years. The ABC Sunday Beltway show turned in its strongest sweep performance in the news demo in six years, and its smallest news demo gap against frontrunner, CBS’s Face the Nation, during a February ratings derby in four years.

For the February sweep, This Week with George Stephanopoulos drew 3.017 million total viewers — 954,000 of them in the news demo. Building on its previous, November sweep results (2.792 million and 825,000 for November 2014) This Week turned in its strongest sweeps performance with adults 25-54 in since years – since February 2009.

Competitively, This Week is outdelivering NBC’s Meet the Press for the first time during a season in 18 years in total viewers (31,000) and by its largest news-demo margin (64,000 viewers) in 22 years – since the 1996-97 and the 1992-93 seasons, respectively.

NBC News today instead focused on the fact that Meet the Press with Chuck Todd was No. 1  among total viewers this past Sunday, besting ABC and CBS, for the first time since Todd’s debut on the show on September 7, ’14. MTP finished ahead of This Week in the news demo for the week but behind CBS’s frontrunning Face the Nation. In the news demo, MTP narrowed the gap to just 3,000 viewers compared to Face the Nation’s half hour average. Todd’s program led This Week by 219,000 viewers in the key adult 25-54 news age bracket.