network news

Donald Trump tweeted today that he has decided on his pick to fill the vacant ninth seat on the U.S. Supreme Court. He said he will announce his pick at 8 p.m. ET Tuesday.

Even in the digital era, the Sunday morning news shows are an important way for candidates to spread their messages in election years. Ratings usually dip in non-election years, but with Donald Trump in the White House that could change. The sound bites pepper social media for days. Analyst Andrew Tyndall talks about which shows are doing it best, why hosts matter, and how ratings will hold up.

NBC News marks Tom Brokaw‘s 50 years with the network with a two-hour primetime special this Sunday called Tom Brokaw at NBC News: The First 50 Years.

Journalists were in a state of shock a day after Sean Spicer, the press secretary, employed a combative tone and false statements in his first appearance on the White House podium.

NBC News’ Today finished first among broadcast morning shows in total viewers and demos in December, celebrating its first non-Olympics monthly win in more than four years. As the programs all talked up their stats for the final quarter of 2016, Today topped the pack in the news demo, with 1.79 million viewers aged 25-54, besting ABC’s Good Morning America (1.53M) and CBS This Morning (1.12M).

For the fifth time in six weeks, CBS Sunday Morning with Jane Pauley delivered more than 6 million viewers, topping the weekday morning shows by more than a million viewers.

It took 16 years for ABC’s Good Morning America to end the historic streak by NBC’s Today as the most-watched program in morning television in 2012. But the race has tightened considerably over the last year. GMA is still the most popular show overall in the 2016-17 TV season, but NBC has topped GMA twice in overall viewers in the last five weeks and CBS This Morning is up 6% this season.

NEW YORK (AP) — ‘Today’ show co-host Savannah Guthrie has given birth to her second child, a boy. Guthrie’s co-host Matt Lauer made the announcement on the air Friday morning. […]

Gayle King has signed a $16.5 million deal to remain co-host of CBS This Morning for another three years alongside Charlie Rose and Norah O’Donnell.

While CBS denies it, multiple sources tell the New York Post that the network is planning to move Scott Pelley over to 60 Minutes — where he is already an anchor — full time, and replace him on the network’s flagship news broadcast.

NBC is taking back more ground in the scorched-earth morning-news battle between its Today and ABC’s Good Morning America. Today wooed more viewers overall than its rival, as well as in the audience most coveted by advertisers, for the week ended Nov. 28, the second time it has done so in the last two weeks.

Today show co-anchor Savannah Guthrie has signed a new multi-year deal to extend her stay at Today for multiple years. There is some speculation her new contract puts her paycheck closer to that of the $20 million a year her co-host Matt Lauer is getting in his new deal.

ABC News’ Good Morning America and World News Tonight  both won November sweeps for the first time in 21 years. World News Tonight averaged 8.6 million viewers to edge NBC Nightly News by only 96,000, giving the show its first November sweep win since November 2001 when Peter Jennings sat in the chair currently occupied by David Muir.

This week the anchors and executives of the major networks walked into an ambush that affirmed the media as Trump’s whipping boy and left him victorious in his woodshed fury, Margaret Sullivan writes. But while the TV folks agreed to go off-the-record, the Times staffers “successfully called Trump’s bluff” and refused to. The lesson, she writes, is “journalists, and their corporate bosses, shouldn’t allow themselves to be used as props in Trump’s never-ending theater.”

President-elect Donald J. Trump, now the nation’s press critic in chief, inviting the leading anchors and executives of television news to join him on Monday for a private meeting of minds. On-air stars like Lester Holt, Charlie Rose, George Stephanopoulos and Wolf Blitzer headed to Trump Tower for the off-the-record gathering, typically the kind of event where journalists and politicians clear the air after a hard-fought campaign. Instead, the president-elect delivered a defiant message: You got it all wrong.

Kellyanne Conway, the campaign manager of Donald Trump’s winning presidential run, says that the off-the-record meeting today between the president-elect and top brass from ABC News, CBS News, NBC News, CNN and Fox News was “excellent” as well as “very candid and honest.”

The off-the-record meeting is scheduled for 1 p.m. ET today and will include top executives and anchors from the nation’s five biggest television networks — ABC, NBC, CBS, CNN and Fox News. Kellyanne Conway, the president-elect’s campaign manager and senior adviser, set up the meeting, and there’s plenty to talk about.

Former Fox News host Gretchen Carlson, who filed that first sexual harassment lawsuit against former Fox News chief Roger Ailes, will be interviewed by ABC News’s 20/20 for a full hour on the subject of sexual harassment. It airs on Friday.

Donald Trump may be the free press’ greatest adversary, but he’s been a boon for traffic and ratings at many major news organizations, who now won’t necessarily see a withdrawal with a Trump election loss. Through his stunning victory, Trump may have handed the media something of an economic lifeline, even if most of its members are currently more interested in their own culpability in his election than the opportunity he may have afforded.

It averages 12 million total viewers, ahead of No. 2 ABC with 9.7 million. CBS places third with 8.8 million, though the ratings will adjust. Look for updates later today.

Former Fox News anchor Gretchen Carlson is set for 20/20 on November 18, marking her first television interview since the Roger Ailes debacle.

Relying on polls and group think, television networks began covering election night with a barely concealed assumption that Clinton would win, only to see the actual results suggest something quite different. Tens of millions of Americans followed the drama on all manner of screens as the drama stretched into the early morning.

As television news gears up for 2016’s big finale, an intense public distrust in the media is threatening the networks’ traditional role as election night scorekeeper.  And new digital competitors plan to break the usual election-night rules and issue real-time predictions long before polls close.