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Under Couric, Ratings Race Is Once Again, Well, a Race

Two weeks after Katie Couric embarked on her new career as an evening news anchor, one thing is clear: She has thus far made the ratings race among the three network newscasts more competitive than it has been in nearly a decade.

Last week, Ms. Couric drew an average of 7.9 million viewers each night, according to preliminary figures from Nielsen Media Research that were released yesterday by the networks. If, as expected, those figures remain essentially unchanged when Nielsen puts out final results today, Ms. Couric’s program on CBS will have beaten “NBC Nightly News with Brian Williams’’ by an average of only about 70,000 viewers each night last week — and topped “World News with Charles Gibson’’ on ABC by about 370,000.

Those results are noteworthy both for Ms. Couric’s apparent victory for the week — when coupled with her opening week, it would represent the first time CBS had won back-to-back weeks since July 1998 — but also for how exceptionally tight the three-way race has become, at least for now.

In the demographic category on which evening-news advertising is sold (viewers ages 25 to 54), Ms. Couric drew a 2.1 rating last week, according to preliminary Nielsen figures, compared with 2.0 for both NBC and ABC. By comparison, during the 12 months before her arrival, the “CBS Evening News’’ had a 1.9 rating in that audience category, compared with 2.4 for NBC and 2.3 for ABC. (A ratings point in that demographic represents about 1.2 million viewers.)

While the two weeks Ms. Couric has been on the job represents far too short a period to evaluate her performance from a business perspective, she has, initially, raised the network’s perennial third-place standing.

“Two weeks is two weeks,’’ said Chris Boothe, president of Starcom USA, a media planning and buying agency that has placed advertising for Discover Card, Walgreens and Kellogg on the network evening news. “But she has definitely turned it into a ballgame.’’

And yet, there was much for both NBC and ABC to celebrate in the ratings estimates for last week, considering that CBS has trumpeted Ms. Couric’s arrival on the evening news with a huge marketing campaign.

Assuming that Ms. Couric’s broadcast outpaced Mr. Williams’s by about 70,000 viewers last week, then he, in the span of a week, managed to virtually erase the 3.1-million-viewer margin that her program held over his during her first week. Then, on average, she drew 10.2 million viewers a night, and he 7.1 million.

Similarly, Mr. Williams’s audience last week appears to have increased by about 700,000 (to 7.83 million) when compared with the week before, which suggests that he is wooing back at least some of those who may have forsaken him to sample Ms. Couric.

Mr. Gibson’s audience, too, appears to have grown from Ms. Couric’s first week (when he drew an average of 6.9 million) to last week (an estimated 7.5 million.)

“It’s a wide open race,’’ said Jon Banner, executive producer of Mr. Gibson’s program. “In six months, it’s anybody’s bet as to who’s in first place.’’

A spokeswoman for NBC News, Barbara Levin, declined yesterday to comment. But amid a flurry of near-daily press releases from CBS News over the last two weeks, Ms. Levin put out a statement last Tuesday noting that Mr. Williams’s broadcast had outdrawn Ms. Couric and Mr. Gibson on the fifth anniversary of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks.

Ms. Couric’s dip to third place in the ratings that night had merited a front-page headline on Wednesday in USA Today. Sean McManus, the president of CBS News and Sports, was concerned enough about the perception that Ms. Couric was losing ground that his representatives offered him up for interviews to The New York Times, among other outlets.

“I’m no more elated today than I was depressed yesterday,’’ he said last week. “There seems to be this rush to judgment.’’

He added, “To even be in the race for No. 1 is an accomplishment.’’

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