David Muir of ABC News was the top-rated nightly news host for the 2023-24 season on network television, AdWeek reported on Tuesday. Alas, it was a Pyrrhic victory for the World News Tonight host, who remains mired in controversy after his shockingly partisan performance at the Sept. 10 debate between Donald Trump and Kamala Harris.
World News Tonight led all networks this season with an average of 7.72 million viewers, including just 1.07 million, or 14 percent (!), between the ages of 25 and 54, the only demographic that matters to advertisers. Those numbers were good enough to best the "competition" at CBS and NBC, but they are still significantly diminished compared with previous years.
Muir's average total viewership in 2023-24 was down 5 percent (383,000) compared with last season and down a whopping 12 percent (1.02 million) from 2020-21, the year Trump left office. The decline was even worse in the 25-54 age group. Muir's average viewership in the coveted demographic fell 17 percent (218,000) compared with 2022-23. It was down 27 percent (398,000) from 2021-22 and a staggering 37 percent (618,000) from 2020-21.
Viewed in this context, Muir's ratings "win" simply confirms that all nightly news programs are but shadows of their former selves, desperately clinging to relevance in a dying industry as their elderly audience literally dies off. It would be sad if it were happening to anyone else. But it's happening to journalists and their corporate overlords, so it's still sad but also kind of funny.
ABC News praised Muir for hosting "America's No. 1 evening newscast." Why wouldn't they? The Disney-owned network pays him what is believed to be an eight-figure annual salary to read a teleprompter to an audience of senior citizens who struggle with mobility and are often incapable of changing the channel. Many of them are tuning in because their home health aides want to make sure they're set up with their pudding trays in time for Jeopardy! at 7 p.m. (and don't forget Wheel of Fortune at 7:30).
Even lesser-rated journalists are weirdly invested in portraying Muir as a juggernaut of mainstream media. It's certainly true that he has one of the best physiques, courtesy of the Equinox luxury fitness club where he spends most of his time. Muir had also sculpted and toned his reputation as an unbiased news drone, only to reveal his true partisan colors during the debate by treating Harris with kid gloves and pestering Trump with dubious "fact checks."
Last week, when Fox News reported that Muir's ratings dropped by 12 percent in the days following the Sept. 10 debate, the industry's most notorious partisan sycophants rallied to his defense. Brian Stelter (currently and formerly of CNN) and Puck's Dylan Byers (formerly but not currently of CNN) attempted to debunk Fox's (accurate) report by promoting an ABC News press release insisting the ratings for the Sept. 16 airing of World News Tonight was 9 percent larger compared with "the same period a year ago," as Deadline phrased it. What period? That wasn't clear, but networks often use vague language to tout viewership numbers that are famously easy to spin in one's favor. "Like a Roman augur reading entrails," an industry source tells us.
The site TV Ratings Guide, which tracks and analyzes network ratings, dismissed the ABC News spin, based on the purported ratings from a single broadcast, as "a flimsy argument." But it was solid enough for Byers, the job-hopping former Politico scribe best known for his subservient defense of George Stephanopoulos in 2015 after the Washington Free Beacon exposed the ABC News anchor's donations to the Clinton Foundation.
Byers's reporting in Puck seemed to imply that Muir's chiseled physique was the physical manifestation of Godlike wisdom. "Muir drew his best ratings in five weeks," Byers wrote with unflappable credulity. The claim, drawn from the ABC News press release, amounts to a meaningless boast given that network ratings have historically declined during the August vacation season. There was "no real merit to the argument," Byers huffed, that Muir's partisan outbursts at the debate had caused the chiseled host's rating to fall even further than they already had in recent years.
Some industry observers predicted Muir's ratings would suffer after his partisan conduct at the debate because the same thing happened to Lester Holt of NBC News in 2016. Like Muir, Holt had cultivated a reputation for objective reporting before moderating a debate between Trump and Hillary Clinton, sometimes referred to as "Crooked." Holt revealed his partisan bias during the debate, pestering Trump with so-called fact checks about New York City's racially charged "stop and frisk" police tactics, among other issues. Holt doubled down during a 2017 interview with Trump in which he badgered the president about his campaign's alleged "collusion" with Russia.
Viewers took notice, and changed the channel. The ratings for Holt's Nightly News program never recovered, and in May 2018, Muir surpassed his NBC News counterpart as the highest-rated nightly news host on television. An industry source tells us these programs are especially sensitive to even the slightest drop in ratings due to the old age and sedentary nature of the viewing audience. "Once you lose viewers, once the channel is changed, they never come back," the source says.
Muir's ratings controversy comes as ABC News is under increasing pressure to conclusively refute the allegations of an anonymous "whistleblower" who allegedly revealed in a sworn affidavit that the network colluded with Harris by sharing the debate questions in advance. Last week, ABC News initially declined to address the specific allegations outlined in the document, which has not been verified. An anonymous network spokesperson subsequently told the Daily Beast that Harris was "absolutely not … given any questions before the debate."
Muir was compelled to defend himself last week during a hard-hitting appearance on an ABC sister program, LIVE with Kelly and Mark, hosted by oversexed soap opera veterans Kelly Ripa and Mark Consuelos. "I believe it was our duty to ask [about] the issues that Americans care about," Muir said while wearing a T-shirt under a blazer with jeans and ugly combat boots. "All of the noise that you hear afterward, about, you know, 'Which candidate won the debate, did the moderators win or lose,' that's just noise."
Before exposing his true self during the debate, Muir was best known for traveling the world in a tight-fitting black shirt, flaunting his chiseled biceps in disaster zones next to children suffering from malnutrition, and posting the photos of himself on Instagram.
