After years of toiling in the shadows of a giant, ABC's Sunday morning public affairs program, "This Week With George Stephanopoulos," is finally beginning to step into the spotlight once exclusively occupied by NBC's "Meet the Press."
It's the economy, stupid, plus "This Week's" round table has been called pretty smart.
"Meet the Press" has long been the dominant program, so far this season attracting about 4.3 million viewers each week. In recent years, it had attracted nearly double the audience of the second-place "This Week."
But the NBC show began slipping in the ratings after the unexpected loss of Tim Russert, who died in June. Tom Brokaw filled in for several months before the network named its chief White House correspondent, David Gregory, as the show's anchor in December.
The changes may have displaced some Russert loyalists. Meanwhile, Stephanopoulos' show, along with CBS' "Face the Nation" with Bob Schieffer and "Fox News Sunday With Chris Wallace," have benefited from not only the turmoil but also the larger audiences tuning in to the Sunday morning news shows in the last year, drawn by an interest in the presidential election, the early days of Barack Obama's administration and the collapsing economy.
"This Week" is averaging 3.3 million viewers per week this season, 20% more than in the previous season. Last week, the audience gap between the two shows was just 360,000 viewers -- the smallest in more than a decade.
"People have found themselves free to sample Stephanopoulos, and after all of those years in second place, he had time to get his show right," said Andrew Tyndall, publisher of the Tyndall Report, an online site that tracks network news. Another distinction, he said, is that Stephanopoulos' "round table is the best forum on Sunday mornings."
Last fall, Stephanopoulos recognized the enormity of the financial crisis, which in November led ABC to hire Paul Krugman, a Nobel Prize-winning economist and New York Times op-ed columnist, to join the round table.
When he's on, Krugman mixes it up with other Big Brains, including longtime conservative commentator George Will, former House Speaker Newt Gingrich and Stephanopoulos.
The in-depth policy debates play well with the upscale and well-educated viewers, as well as Washington insiders and political junkies, who faithfully tune in to these Sunday morning shows.
